Word: beliefs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...century's foremost woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead was an American icon. On dozens of field trips to study the ways of primitive societies, she found evidence to support her strong belief that cultural conditioning, not genetics, molded human behavior. That theme was struck most forcefully in Mead's 1928 classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. It described an idyllic pre-industrial society, free of sexual restraint and devoid of violence, guilt and anger. Her portrait of free-loving primitives shocked contemporaries and inspired generations of college students--especially during the 1960s sexual revolution. But it may have been too good...
While the brothers' bicycle business paid the bills, it was Wilbur's abiding dream of building a full-size flying machine that inspired their work. For many years, he once said, he had been "afflicted with the belief that flight is possible." The reality of that obsession was a lonely quest for the brothers in the workroom behind their bike shop, plotting to defy gravity and conquer the wind. Yet that obsessive kind of world-changing belief is a force that drives you to solve a problem, to find the breakthrough--a force that drives you to bet everything...
...shared this respect for children--John Dewey in the U.S., Maria Montessori in Italy and Paulo Freire in Brazil--fought harder for immediate change in the schools, but Piaget's influence on education is deeper and more pervasive. He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge--little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world. And though he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud or even...
...core of Piaget is his belief that looking carefully at how knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. Whether this has in fact led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, controversial. In the past decade Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current fashion of viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those, like me, who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the difference between...
...initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Fresh out of Cambridge, Louis set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland--and to discover evidence for his own belief that true man, Homo, had a very ancient origin...