Delightful as well as convincing in its plea that educators place learning over winnowing and access over exclusivity.
Compelling advice on how to improve education.
Now centuries old, the complaint that schools are factories, taking in students as raw material and churning out a standardized product, no longer serves, according to MIT professor Sarma, who prefers the term winnowing. A winnower blows air through unrefined matter, eliminating chaff, debris, and waste but also valuable material, producing a more homogenous end product. This baleful process began around 1900, when education theory and quasi-scientific methods ran off the track. The first intelligence tests were better at winnowing a subset of good learners than the previous methods (teachers’ opinions, personal connections), but they were based on the flawed notion that intelligence is fixed at birth, so “the main challenge facing schools was not to improve intelligence, but to separate the apt from the inept.” Tests also favored the privileged—e.g., “define regatta.” Sarma devotes parts of the book to the neuroscience of how the brain processes information and to psychology research that provides a solid basis for some educational strategies but has shot down more than one. Describing education today, the author does not take sides in the interminable debate over whether students should “follow their own impulses in determining what to learn, or…stick to topics their instructors deem important.” Rather, Sarma identifies what doesn’t work (the idea “that most students require specialized education media depending on their supposed brain makeup,” a theory that “lingers zombie-like in education culture despite a wealth of evidence against it”), hopeful dead ends, and the best of current techniques. The author is most partial to Montessori schools—though he notes that “the name ‘Montessori” is untrademarkable, and the degree to which schools stick to Maria Montessori’s time-honed methods varies wildly”—and high-tech, online programs, which are expensive and effective when a teacher is involved but cheap and ineffective without one.
Delightful as well as convincing in its plea that educators place learning over winnowing and access over exclusivity.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54182-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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