Originally published in 1988, The Mastery of Reason is, on one level, a study of children’s cognitive development. It engages with debates about the ‘individual’ and the ‘social context’ in accounts of children’s mathematical development at the time. However, Valerie Walkerdine seeks to go beyond these debates.
Originally published in 1988, The Mastery of Reason is, on one level, a study of children’s cognitive development. It engages with debates about the ‘individual’ and the ‘social context’ in accounts of children’s mathematical development at the time. However, Valerie Walkerdine 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 fascinating inter-changes 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 unreason, 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.
This book is unique in its relevance both to educational practice and to psychological and social theory. It is an important contribution to the literature available to students of developmental and social psychology, sociology, social theory, and education.
Arvustused
Review for the original edition:
Walkerdine displays a splendid ability to make innovative interpretations of the ways children struggle to learn mathematics At their most successful, her arguments may intelligently divert educators from their math warpath and suggest some new directions. In so doing Walkerdine is protecting children from what we, as she so observantly states, subject them to. She is a math advocate not only for children, but also for adults who still strive to understand why mathematics can inflict such terror and pain. C. Bluhm, Human Development
Acknowledgements.
1. Introduction
2. Relational Terms in Everyday Social
Practices: More or Less Reconsidered
3. The Insertion of Size and Family
Terms in School and Experimental Practices
4. Size and Family Relations in
Home Practices
5. Practices in Which Numeracy is Produced
6. School
Mathematics as a Discursive Practice: Beginnings
7. 2p Doesnt Buy Much These
Days: Learning About Money at Home and at School
8. The Achievement of
Mastery
9. Pleasure and the Mastery of Reason
10. The Practices of Reason.
References. Index.
Valerie Walkerdine FRSA, FLSW, FAcSS is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Visiting Professor in the London School of Economics and Political Science, one of the editors of Ideology and Consciousness (I and C), co-author of Changing the Subject (Routledge), Editor of Subjectivity (Palgrave) and author of many books and journal articles.
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