Linda Wallin's Page

Thanks, Linda, for joining the community.

The range of your interests and activities--from following developments in neuroscience, instructing educators to use new technologies, and helping kids learn--to writing poetry--is remarkable. You're a walking-talking example of Gardner's multi-intelligenced person.

As soon as I'm finished writing this note, I'm going to click my way over to the new group you've started and join. Somewhere about halfway through E.O. Wilson's book "Consilience," Wilson says: "The social sciences are hampered...by the residue of strong historical precedent. Ignorance of the natural sciences by design was a strategy fashioned by the founders, most notably Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and their immediate followers. They aimed to isolate their nascent disciplines from the foundational sciences of biology and psychology, which at the inception of the social sciences were in any case too primitive to be of clear relevance. This stance was fruitful at first....But once the pioneering era ended, the theorists were mistaken not to include biology and psychology. It was no longer a virtue to avoid the roots of human nature."

Wilson's thinking might be applied in an analogous way to the field of education. It's time we developed educators as scientists and technologists and created learning environments based on interdisciplinary findings about the natural development of human minds and personalities.

Skip