[Book Review] Surpassing Ourselves

This article is the book review of ‘Surpassing Ourselves’(1993), written by Carl Bereiter. Carl Edward Bereiter is the American education researcher. I would summarize some key point of this book.

The book consist of 8 chapter. The first 1~3 chapter, author said about conceptual property of expertise — the way expert thinks, using knowledge. The big question in this part is “what is the difference between novice and expert, between expert and experienced non-expert”.

In the problem solving situation, experts approach it progressively and focus on meaningful pattern. While non-expert struggle hard to solve that problem, lost in the problem.

And after chapter 4~5, he mentioned about the development of expertise. The phrase ‘process of expertise’ is used frequently in this part, because Bereiter viewed expertise as a spectrum. The difference between the word ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ is important in understanding the concept. ‘Expertise’ means the high ability and property in specific domain. While ‘Expert’ means the people who recognized as high performer in one domain publicly.

Other theme in the expertise development is the ‘creativity’. Why there are the gap between creative expert and noncreative expert? The experts who innovate their original domain seems creative. That expertise is called as ‘adaptive expertise’ which expertise transferred to one domain to other.

Chapter 6 “Expertlike Learner” operates important role in this book. It connect previous discussion of micro-view of expertise to macro-view of expertise — society related —. In the same learning environment, why who can become an expert and the others are not. Bereiter called people who has potential to grow as expert as expert learner. Author emphasize the word ‘knowledge-building scheme’ which makes the difference.

In the last chapter 7~8, Bereiter explained about the sociological view of expertise. There’re might be no one who don’t wants to be an expert in his/her working domain. But in reality, not everyone could be an expert since the scarcity of expertise. If everyone can use fork to eat salad or apply
Pythagorean Law to solve mathematical problem, that skills are not conceived as expertise. So the one of important question in expertise is ‘Does everyone can be an expert? is it possible and useful?’

Essential needs of private company is earning money. To make money, each workers in company should orient to be expert. Because the two components, expertise and leadership, are the core elements related with performance. So company should face ironic situation, add average expertise vs expertise asdfdf