Guaranteed to discomfit the education establishment.
A provocative case, from education entrepreneur Whittle, on the need to reform public schools—the details of which ought to thrill any kids in the audience.
Founder of the Edison Schools franchise (“If it were an actual public school system, Edison would be the forty-seventh largest in the country”), Whittle reckons that 20 percent of all Americans spend all day within the K-12 educational system, which “enrolls or employs 54 million people, nearly the population of Great Britain.” Yet, he writes, unlike the comparably funded military, which achieves generally excellent results with what it has and constantly seeks to improve operations, schools are reluctant to involve outsiders, particularly when it comes to curriculum design; there is little oversight in the economy of education, and little recourse for the roughly 15 million children, mostly poor and of color, who receive substandard education. The “systematic failure” in performance, Whittle urges, can be fixed, and can be done so by the year 2030—and here’s where the argument gets interesting, for Whittle reckons that market forces and incentives can be brought to bear, classroom sizes can get bigger, students can be given significantly greater freedom and teachers can be paid significantly larger salaries—and all without massive burden to the taxpayer. He offers plenty of specifics to back up his case, as well as five “truths” of school design that accord children a broader and more active role in their own education than they enjoy in the highly regimented schools we have now. Among Whittle’s recommendations: allow considerably independent, unmonitored time for such things as reading (which children otherwise don’t find time for) and socializing; teach practical skills—about money and computers, for instance; and see to it that teaching is truly treated as a profession, with “compensation keyed to performance and responsibility, not seniority.”
Guaranteed to discomfit the education establishment.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-59448-902-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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