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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
