Constructivism, Social

Arthur Shapiro

In looking for constructivism in 1990 in education, you would find hardly a mention, although in science and mathematics, the “science wars” about constructivism started earlier. Jacqueline G. Brooks and Martin G. Brooks introduced the construct/theory/philosophy into education in In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms , in 1993. The fathers of contemporary constructivism start with eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Philosopher Denis C. Phillips noted that Kant argued that certain aspects of knowledge of the physical universe (time and space, for example) were products of our own cognitive apparatus—we construct the universe to have certain properties, or, rather, our faculty of understanding imposes those temporal and spatial properties on our experience. René Descartes asserted that he had examined all of his beliefs and dropped those that did not meet his “light of reason” test. While this does not make him a constructivist, he was questioning beliefs unless they ...

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