The mastery of reason : cognitive development and the production of rationality
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The mastery of reason : cognitive development and the production of rationality
Routledge, 1990
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [217]-222
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This study of children's cognitive development engages with current debates about the "individual" and the "social context" in accounts of children's mathematical development. However, the author seeks to go beyond these debates to establish the empirical and theoretical base for a different kind of understanding of the social and psychological production of reason and rationality. She does so by presenting empirical material concerning children's learning of mathematics, both at home and in the early years of schooling. The book is packed with interchanges between mothers or teachers and children. However, an analysis of the apparently innocent subject of children's mathematical development can also offer profound and disturbing insights into the way in which our bourgeois democracy is maintained. Valerie Walkerdine shows how notions of rationality and the triumph over reason, which are encouraged in the teaching of mathematics, are an early induction into the fantasy of control over a calculable universe, necessary to sustain our present social and political order.
Table of Contents
- Relational terms in everyday social practices - more or less reconsidered
- the insertion of size and family terms in school and experimental practices
- size and family relations in home practices
- practices in which numeracy is produced
- school mathematics as a discursive practice - beginnings
- 2p doesn't buy much these days - learning about money at home and school
- the achievement of mastery
- pleasure and the mastery of reason
- the practices of reason.
by "Nielsen BookData"