David Perkins’ Future Wise Chapter 2 & 3 Review

by
Gabriel Molina

Photo courtesy of: Harvard School of Education

Chapter two salient points:

→ Knowledge is like a vehicle: for it to be meaningful it must be used to “go somewhere”, that is, to
apply it in practical ways.

→ What gets in the way of this is, Perkins says, are three things: achievement, information and
expertise. If wrongly imparted, they will cause difficulties for the learner.

Achievement:
→ The achievement gap between well-off people and the economically disadvantaged: is it a matter of
lack of policy-based support?

→ Quality teaching is one of the solutions, but it’s not steady. Challenge born from teacher and
curriculum quality has a bigger impact on students, particularly low-performing ones, than initial
achievement levels.

→ There should be relevance in student achievement (Perkins gives the example of reading and writing
Vs quadratic equations).

→ There should be a clear return on investment for students’ lives for learning to actually matter more.

→ Topics and themes which may not be so relevant anymore for teaching might get displaced: some
teachers might feel intimidated by this and this creates resistance.

Information:
→ What is the actual importance of shared, common knowledge?

→ Developing proper reading skills is tied to cultured knowledge about the world (Hirsch)

→ A reader’s weak performance is linked to a poor knowledge pool

→ The way people have access to this information matters: are they being drilled into it or is it linked
to actual social relevance?
→ Information found a through processes, specially if didactically obtained, are more prone to be
acquired than just “Googled”.

Expertise:
→ Is current knowledge taught through the regular curricula enough to connect basic knowledge with
more broad, abstract even, elements of thought?

→ Expertise is thought to arise from basic to more advance knowledge and curricula follow this
format, regardless of the relevance of the content.

→ Curricula should be composed more of knowledge that impacts students’ lives. In other words,
knowledge that has relevance should have more spotlight.

→ An “amateur” is more relevant, flexible and viable of a goal for education than an “expert”.

→ With this Perkins does not mean that overly advance knowledge teaching is a mistake, but that it
should not overshadow important basics.

→ Concludes by remembering the mitosis dance: a great kinesthetic activity that proved to be more
engaging as a coating (dancing, movement, better memory, fun, etc.) than the topic in which it was
based. Perkins doesn’t think mitosis and its elements should be removed from curricula but he still
reflects on its usefulness for students outside of the classroom.

Chapter three salient points:

→ Perkins provides a framework for identifying specific knowledge as “big understandings”.

→ Democracy is the first element analyzed through this lens in terms of insight, action, ethics and
opportunity.

→ They mean, respectively, how it works, how we can actually do something with it, how ethically
important it is and actually grasping real examples to see how it works more deeply.

→ DEMOCRACY:

-Insight: Ideas about Democracy give valuable insight about our democratic societies.

-Action: This knowledge allows us to know how to handle democracy in many different and
responsible ways.

-Ethics: It also encourages for ethical reflection on democratic practices.

-Opportunity: The most obvious opportunities come from today’s world. Different democratic societies,
other not democratic societies and their situation, etc.
→ Something very important Perkins add is the fact that Opportunity must really be there for the
knowledge to be valid: if it’s not possible to actually see it or use it it would invalidate most of the
points elucidated on Chapter 2.

→ He also adds the idea that big understandings of a subject (mitosis) might not be so in other subjects
or in regular areas of our lives.

→ He talks about recipe knowledge and its importance. It is easy and flexible to know a simple list
very well and then add little bits of personal touches and create something different/personal/creative
with it.

→ He explains, in percentages, that 90% of shared knowledge is recipe knowledge and the big
understandings are only a 10%.

→ How do big understandings contribute to our lives, then?

-Orientation: it gives you a foundation for quick discourse; in the example of democracy, we would be
able to think more critically related to what’s good or not for democracy during a politician’s speech.

-Deliberation: In a similar vein, this element accounts for insightful decisions based on analyzed data
one may take during different situations (which is connected to Orientation).

-Further learning: They also offer an introduction to the bigger picture, like an umbrella term that
encompasses and connected many different knowledge items inside, which helps tremendously to learn
them all.

→ Perkins further acknowledges big learnings should take a step back in education and be organized
according to their usefulness percentage they belong to. With this, he means overshadowing basic,
recipe knowledge which may provide more opportunity for most learners is something to be avoided.

→ He shows a neat idea/comparison with how Literature teachers work: selection, which he calls
smart sampling.

→ Smart sampling is formed through a two-part framework that accounts for the problem of
superabundance of content.
David Perkins’ Profile:

David Perkins is a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. For many years, he
served as co-director, and is now senior co-director and a member of the steering committee. Perkins
conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding,
individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum
projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa,
Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the United States. He is actively involved in school change. Perkins was one
of the principal developers of WIDE World, a distance learning model practitioners now embedded in
programs at HGSE. He is the author of numerous publications, including fourteen authored or co-authored
books. His books include; The Eureka Effect, about creativity; King Arthurs Round Table, about organizational
intelligence and learning; Making Learning Whole, a general framework for deepening education at all levels;
and Future Wise, about what's worth teaching for the contemporary era.

Source: Harvard School of Education (n.d.) David Perkins. Retrieved from

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/david-perkins on October 28th , 2019.

Summary source: Perkins, D. (2014) Future Wise Educating our Children for a Changing World.
Jossey-Bass.