When I reviewed Henry M Wellman’s Making Minds in 2015 I concluded with a sentence to the effect of “I wish there were a general reader version of this book” (as opposed to the scholarly work it was). Not that it was anything other than a pefectly fine book, but that it’s not that approachable by any one of us average Joes browsing in a bookstore.
This is the book I hoped for. It’s a bit as if Charles Darwin had written, in about 1864, a book on evolution for the general reader. Maybe I’m stretching it likening Wellman to Darwin, but he is in fact a founder and continuing world leader in a new branch of science, what’s known as The Child’s Theory of Mind, which is what his books are about. Like Darwin, he’s not the only contemporary to be thinking along these lines, but he’s the one to put the most threads together into a coherent tapestry.
I'd give this six stars if I could.
An advantage this book has over the older one, apart from its approachability (credit in part is due to his co-author, writer Karen Lind), is that it’s five years newer, and much has happened in that time. So the book ends with a few chapters about what this all means—again for the generalist—and in many ways I found that the best part. It keeps attaching itself to other material I read in different disciplines: for instance, in an article I just read on distributed learning, I find resonance with Wellman, who writes: “We don’t live merely individually or in a community of bodies; we live in a community of minds. We would not be such competent thinkers if we had to rely on the limited knowledge stored in our own minds. One secret of our success is that we live in community. Figuratively, we never think alone.” His reflections on the Buddhist notion of mind return to me as I lie in bed at night.
The list goes on. If I were responsible for training teachers, I would put this book first in the syllabus for the first course. After having been a teacher for my entire career, I found new material that changed the way I thought about the discipline. But the book is really for all of us, because we all deal, every day (even during Coronavirus!) with other people, whose thoughts we need to intuit, and whose reactions we need to consider in advance.
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