Cornelius N. Grove

What is the explanation for American students' comparatively mediocre academic performance? A Mirror for Americans finds part of it in how they are taught in primary schools. Comparisons with East Asian teaching are supplied by 50 years of research findings. Grove asks not that we copy East Asian teaching approaches, but that we use them as a mirror to gain insights into typically American approaches and their underlying values, which are handicapping our children's learning.

What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel

A Mirror for Americans

The Aptitude Myth addresses the decline in American children s mastery of critical school subjects. It contends that a contributing cause for this decline derives from many Americans ways of thinking about children s learning: They believe that school performance is determined very largely by innate aptitude. The Aptitude Myth traces the deep historical origins, the spread and elaboration, and the eventual triumph of the belief in the determining power of mental abilities given at birth and therefore fixed. Covered is 600 B.C.E. until 1926 (when the S.A.T. was first administered). The belief in aptitude, assumed by many Americans to be the modern view of learning ability, is revealed as an archaic way of thinking that originated in the imaginations of our ancient forebears and gradually gained credibility over 2,500 years. In recent times, the belief became elaborated to include the fanciful notion that more-than-modest academic study injures a child s health. Having inherited this mindset, Americans don t know how to insure that children gain mastery. A new mindset is needed. The final chapter offers a transformative mindset."

How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children's Learning Today

The Aptitude Myth

What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children's Learning

How Other Children Learn

What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel

Drive to Learn

Countless books and articles have offered remedies for the poor learning outcomes of American schoolchildren. Virtually all of these publications share one thing in common: They propose improvements in the policies and practices controlled by adult educators. Grove believes that our children’s poor learning cannot be totally the fault of educators. Our children are active participants in classrooms, so if there’s a problem with how well our children are learning, then we as parents might be at fault. To discover what our part is and explore what can be done about it, Grove draws on over 100 anthropological studies of children’s learning and child-rearing in China, Japan, and Korea. They reveal that those children, even the youngest ones, are highly receptive to classroom learning. Why do they come into classrooms with attentive and engaged attitudes? How did they acquire the drive to learn? Can American parents benefit from knowing how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean parents think about and carry out child-rearing? The Drive to Learn explores these questions.

Cornelius N. Grove

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