The unconscious sprang to the attention of the West a hundred years ago, and we are still struggling to absorb its full impact. It was one thing to understand the concept, to see it and believe it, but another to live with it, to take in fully its challenge to our deepest cultural assumptions. Today, as we expand our understanding of its reach, we are still coming to grips with what it means. This “new unconscious” is driven by the identities we assume, the groups we belong to, the ideas w...

Few writers ask us to question our fundamental assumptions about education as provocatively as Alfie Kohn. Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.'In this new collection of essa...

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the childr...

Final thoughts from the now-deceased leader of narrative therapy.Michael White’s untimely death deprived therapists of a leading light. Here, available for the first time in book form, is a collection of the work he left behind—writings on topics dear to the psychotherapeutic world: turning points in therapy, conversations, resistance and therapist responsibility, couples therapy, and narrative responses to trauma.

This book builds on two current developments in psychology scholarship and practice. The first centers on broad discontent with the individualist tradition in which the rational agent, or autonomous self, is considered the fundamental atom of social life. Critique of individualism spring not only from psychologists working in the academy, but also from communities of therapy and counseling. The second, and related development from which this work builds, is the search for alternatives to i...

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, offers a powerful, compelling, and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas--by one of America's most important educators, and author of the bestselling Cultural Literacy.For over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning "pr...

The philosopher Cristina Bicchieri here develops her theory of social norms, most recently explained in her 2006 volume The Grammar of Society. Bicchieri challenges many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. She argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Bicchieri's theory accounts for these automatic components of behavior, where indiv...

Vygotsky at Work and Play is an intimate portrayal of the Vygotskian-inspired approach to human development known as ‘social therapeutics’and ‘the psychology of becoming’. Holzman provides an accessible, practical-philosophical portrayal of a unique performance-based methodology of development and learning that draws upon a fresh reading of Vygotsky.This expanded edition includes new content dealing with how Lev Vygotsky’s work can be applied to profound social is...

For the Common Good is an anthology of selected essays by Dr. Harold Lewis, one of the intellectual leaders of the social work profession. Social work literature often reflects powerful ahistorical tendencies which, in recent years, have produced analyses of social issues that lack awareness of both the contemporary environment and the historical forces that shaped it. Lewis' insights into the nature and purpose of social work help fill some of these historical and conceptual gaps, and pre...

The first component of intelligence involves effective adaptation to an environment. In order to adapt effectively, organizations require resources, capabilities at using them, knowledge about the worlds in which they exist, good fortune, and good decisions. They typically face competition for resources and uncertainties about the future. Many, but possibly not all, of the factors determining their fates are outside their control. Populations of organizations and individual organizations s...

Developed from the author’s long teaching career, How to Rethink Human Behavior aims to cultivate practical skills in human observation and analysis, rather than offer a catalogue of immutable ‘facts’. It synthesizes key psychological concepts with insights from other disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, economics, and history.The skills detailed in the book will help readers to observe people in their contexts and to analyze what they observe, in order t...

"In today′s ′teach-to-the-test′ climate, do we ever need a book about wisdom and creativity! Our focus as educators is enriched by this book."—Robert Di Giulio, ProfessorJohnson State College"Creativity, wisdom, and trusteeship may each sound good enough in itself, but the contributors to this volume make a compelling case for how much they need one another."—David Perkins, ProfessorHarvard UniversityHow do creativit...