Throughout the book, Bereiter brings excellent metaphors to our attention to explain complex ideas in simple terms, and then once we get the idea, he bring excellent scholarship to illustrate the point and ground the message in the research.
Early on, he introduces the idea of folk theories and gives familiar examples from science (folk theories of astronomy and botany) to show how these theories can be useful for some applications (knowing when to plant and how to plant), but that when the need gets more complicated, the folk theory begins to fail. Bereiter argues that the folk psychology that holds that the human brain is a container is a folk theory that was useful for engineering schools in the previous century, but that it is no longer helpful.
It is disconcerting to read that all of the educational practices used in the recent past (that includes both those based on behaviorist and Constructivist psychologies!) are based on the assumption that the mind is a container. He points out that the only difference is how the container is filled: for the behaviorist the brain is filled from an expert outside and for the Constructuvist the brain is filled by the learner.
Bereiter points out that human knowledge is far more complex. True understanding depends on the relationship between the knower and what is known and that we understanding occurs when a learner develops the ability and the disposition to behave intelligently.
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