GRASP

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.