Customer Reviews

Coloring Outside the Lines

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Roger Schank hates America's schools, and makes no bones about it. He criticizes attitudes, procedures and policies that were put in place in order to supply unimaginative and obedient drones to industry, and tells parents that if they're able they should homeschool, but if they're unable they should work hard to counteract the destructive effects of a school system that crushes imagination, original thinking and the love of learning.

Schank, a pioneer in cognitive psychology and computer learning, introduces the concepts of dynamic memory, case-based reasoning and scripts, and plays up the importance of computer simulations, role play and field trips. He draws heavily -- almost narcissistically -- on examples from his own children and parenting experiences, sometimes detracting from their utility or universality. For instance, he says parents and teenagers should take walks and long bus rides so they can converse. Huh? The author relates the story of how he and his teenage daughter, given the time and isolation of these activities, achieved better communication. What about a car trip? Plane? Blimp? Camping? He thinks kids should run for office, participate in sports and go to summer camp, whether or not they want to. Sometimes he makes the case, but again his examples and reasoning are so self-centered that one wonders how generalizable they are.

The author posits that most students do not need to be taught math or literature, but do need history and science that is limited to nutrition, health and reproduction. Here the author does a fine job of forcing you to re-evaluate your assumptions about education, but I didn't always agree with his conclusions. He defines the six traits of smarter kids as verbal proficiency, creativity, analytical ability, gumption, ambition and inquisitiveness, and devotes a chapter to each. He advises parents to expect an "A" only in a student's favorite subject and passing grades in all others, defending their children from teachers who are out to squash their spirit. He dislikes television, encourages literacy as soon as possible, defines learning as expectation failure, and believes experimentation is self-regulating.

As you can see, the author is opinionated and a bit eccentric, though I have to say I agree with many of his criticisms and more than a few of his solutions. I do take umbrage at his peevish dismissal of Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences as being too politically correct, making everyone "smart at something" -- as if it's any more bizarre than 'Take Your Teen on a Greyhound Bus' day.

Special chapters are included on the benefits of sports; computer-based learning, including how to evaluate software; and the relative benefits and perils of public schools, private schools and homeschooling as well as the difference between research-oriented universities and smaller liberal arts colleges. I thought these special chapters were especially useful.

A mixed bag but overall a coherent system of helping oversee and supplement the education of your child(ren).

Think you really know what's best for your kids? Read this book. It certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of wisdom on how we should educate our children, but it's the best work on the subject I've seen yet. To read it, though, you have to put aside everything you ever automatically "knew" about school (for example, that it's a good thing) and really THINK about it. What is the purpose of teaching higher math to a child with no aptitude for it and no chance of using it in her career? Why do teachers always insist that children sit quietly and never speak out of turn? Why do parents assume that school will prepare their child for life in the real world?

Roger Schank doesn't accuse teachers of trying to squelch children's interests or administrators of being bad people, but he does point out that the way the school system teaches is completely outdated and unintentionally destroys children's eagerness and passion for learning. To raise a truly intelligent child, Schank says, parents must take charge personally. They must work to undue the damage school does to a child, and to instill positive character traits in a child that will help him develop true intelligence: verbal ability, analytical ability, gumption, inquisitiveness, creativity, and ambition. There are simple (and not-so-simple) ways parents can do this, and Schank dedicates his book to telling us how we can help our children and also WHY we should take charge. He stresses that it isn't easy being a parent and it's even harder parenting a "smarter kid" -- but the goal is a child who knows who she is and finds herself as an adult in a happy and successful situation, doing something she loves and excells at. Isn't that a worthy ambition?

Altogether, COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES is an eye-opening look at education in our country and the future of our kids -- well worth the time to read and put into practice.

I alternately love & hate this book. Schank is into linguistics, computer science & artificial intelligence & in order to study how computers learn, he studied how humans learn. He is currently the founder and director of Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences.

I don't care for his writing style. Although he knows a lot of the concrete research, he puts it aside in order to tell us what worked with his two children. It comes off as narrow-sighted and arrogant. He extrapolates from "what works for my two children" to "this is what everyone should do". At the same time, I agree with most of what he believes about natural learning.

My biggest complaint with him is that the entire book is set up to explain how damaging schools are to children and how parents can undo that damage with the little time they have at home with their children. He constantly and almost-wholly bashes schools, teachers, curriculum, etc., but explicitly dismisses homeschooling as an extreme option. He has the attitude that "school was damaging to my children, but I did a, b, and c, and they survived intact, so you should, too." One of the tactics he used to get better services for his children (a change in teacher, for example) was to throw around his professional clout. He needs to step out of his isolated academic environment to hear stories from all the parents who *try and try and try* to get services for their children and don't get results because they lack that clout....or inner city or rural parents who don't *have* choices....or parents of children with learning disabilities. I kept thinking how delusional he is to think that parents can change the system--even for their one child. Maybe 30-40 years ago in small suburban districts, but not anymore.

Mostly, I kept thinking how ridiculous it was to fight the system that bashes kids into compliance and submission when it's so much easier to just step out of that system and nurture learning (via his good suggestions) 24 hours a day via homeschooling. All the time he spent repairing damage that school does wouldn't be necessary if they weren't in that system in the first place.

If I put aside how bizarre his basic premise was (that a parent's job is to heal school damage over and over and over again), then his basic ideas about how to nurture learning are pretty good. My one annoyance with this part of his philosophy is that I think he still sees education as something you do *TO* a child vs. something that happens naturally (which he also acknowledges). He gives the example of manipulating their bedtime so they're forced to have some boredom to deal with creatively.

I think Schank's on the right track, but the wrong train. Schools are hopelessly messed up--fogettaboutit and move on. Very interesting, book, though, and I think that for parents just considering the issue of school for their little ones, it would be very helpful--if for no other reason than to encourage them not to put their children into that harmful system in the first place.

This book gives insight on raising your child to be smart. His innovative ideas include characteristics such as gumption, creativity and ambition. He gives you concrete examples for you to use to encourage your child's development. The book would be appropriate for anyone with children ages infant through about middle school. He does bash the school system, and depending on your childs school sitiuation he could be right on the money with his critisism of the schools or not. Certianly his critisisms are worth hearing and considering if you have children in the public school system, and I imagine it is applicable to many private schools as well. I originally read a library copy of this book and decided I had to own it so that I could refer to it often. I also found the book to be an enjoyable read; the information is presented with plenty of anecdotes and examples. This book could be a good investment in your kids future if you follow his recommendations.

I agree with one of the previous reviewers about alternately loving and being thoroughly annoyed by this book. One the one hand, I completely agree with Dr. Schank's basic premise that children need to have a wide variety of experiences, learn to overcome failure, have outlets to explore their creativity, have plenty of unstructured leisure time rather than dashing off from one adult-organized activity to the next, have strict limits on TV watching, and be raised by a parent rather than a nanny or daycare center. I also totally agree with him that traditional schools do not foster real learning with their boring lectures and textbooks, obsession with grades and test scores, "one size fits all" curriculum, and so on. Curiously, Dr. Schank does not take the logical step of advocating homeschooling, though he does grudgingly admit that "it's not a terrible idea".

Other reviewers have commented on how the author prefers anecdotes about his own children to a solid discussion of the research literature. He also has a tendency to overgeneralize from their experiences, such as by claiming that most children can learn to read at age 3 or 4. Certainly, there are children who learn to read early (both my daughter and I myself learned prior to our 4th birthdays) but the majority of kids will not be developmentally ready for reading until 5 or 6.

The parts of "Coloring Outside the Lines" that I personally have the biggest disagreement with Dr. Schank are his hostile attitude towards religion and his promotion of permissive parenting. Although he is culturally Jewish, he bashes religious faith throughout the book. He makes the astonishing statement that no eminent modern scientists are devout. What about Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, or Dr. Owen Gingerich, an astrophysicist at Harvard? Faith and reason are complementary ways of knowledge, as the former deals with final causes (WHY something happens) while the latter deals with efficient causes (HOW something happens). Dr. Schank does a great disservice by promoting the artificial conflict between science and religion so popular in modern society.

Finally, the author advocates "lifting all the traditional restrictions parents place on kids- no drinking, no smoking, no sex, no drugs, no staying out late, no going to this party or listening to that music....What you are doing is giving blanket permission to experiment." He seems to feel that abdicating parental responsibility will somehow make children creative and inquisitive rather than spoiled and out of control. Would Dr. Schank advise parents of curious toddlers to allow them to play with matches, sharp knives, electrical outlets, etc.? I highly doubt it due to the potential harm to themselves and others. If it's okay to set reasonable limits on young children's experimentation, why then is he against such limits on older children?

Once you get past the self-aggrandizing author and his countless efforts to appear as an "expert" in child rearing and learning, he has some interesting points. He picks and chooses learning theory when it suits the justification of his own upbringing and that of the way he parented his own children. I suspect that this is why this book was written in the first place. This is purely an advice book from a professor who is clearly stepping out of his field of expertise. Once you get past the pomposity of Schank, you will find that he makes some very good statements about the responsibility of the parent as the primary educator in a child's life. Public education needs to be looked at critically from the perspective of every parent; the propensity for the lackadaisical if not neglectful teaching of any individual child is very high in a public education setting as well as in many private schools. From this stand point, Schank it right on the money. If you want child-rearing advice when it comes to learning and being successful, you money would be better spent on books with a sound basis in theory and practice such as those written about Waldorf and Montessori schools.

Although I enjoyed reading the book and agreed with most of its premises, I was disappointed by the lack of references on the research backing up his recommendations. I am sure they will mostly make sense to many people, however it would have been a lot more powerful if he could have cited back up research and studies.

Another annoyance (at least for me) was the constant use of examples based on his 2 kids (now adults). At the end I was under the impression that all his recommendations were based solely on his own personal experience raising his family. Not sure how unbiased he can be in this assessment.

I'm glad I borrowed this from the library and did not spend my own money on it.

I tend to agree with most of the points that Roger Schank makes in his book. Specifically, I completely agree with him that schools tend to turn students into non-creative conformists. This tendency probably costs the larger society a lot in terms of lost ideas and innovation. Where I disagree with Schank is in his espousal of permissiveness to generate learning experiences. He goes so far as to advocate children trying anything - sexual, drugs, you name it - because they will inevitably learn from it. How misguided from someone who is regarded as an authority in this field to advocate what may cause someone irreparable harm - some lessons are best not learned. I also disagree with his schema for making kids smarter. I think he tries to capture the different traits which he claims makes kids smarter - verbal proficiency, creativity, analytical skill, gumption, ambition and inquisitiveness - into one lump, but it doesn't work, particularly for gumption and inquisitiveness. There are a lot of unintelligent people who possess these traits. Also, I think he failed to state explicitly what the aims are of his plans for "making kids smarter". Based on the text, however, the goal of getting smarter seems to be to lead a fulfilling life where one is engaged in something that fulfills them intellectually and emotionally. Another shortcoming in his book is that he has almost no references. For a PhD, (as is noted after his name) it is surprising that his many claims and assertions are not accompanied by back-up, which gives the book a feel of being a personal, anecdotal thesis rather than something that is backed up by research. This sense is heightened by the fact that many of his points are illustrated by stories about his two children. I do still, however, recommend this book as an antidote to the creativity stifling that occurs in most schools.

About the title of this review: To provide his 12-year old son a learning experience, Schank, a Met fan, allowed him to explore the French metro on his own. As a fellow Met fan, I almost gave him another star, but decided against it.

while i found the book generally interesting, it was quite apparent the author has a difficult time relating his ideas to the more common amongst us. while we would all love to take our children to paris, putting them on the metro to 'discover' is not something most can do...or would want to do.
the authors insight on the value and potential of creative intelliegnce is long overdue. that alone makes the book a good read

Roger Schank clearly thinks of himself as a straight-shooting, tell-it-like-it-is kind of guy. This is not a politically correct book, and I did find it a bit offensive that he referred more than once to certain kids as "dummies," suggested that people who prefer standard American food are "not that smart," and clearly thought of himself as a cut above. The guy could stand to have his ego bruised a bit.

That said, his style of parenting really resonated with me. After reading a number of books that seem to emphasize teaching morals and values at the expense of humor and excitement, I found his suggestions really refreshing. I can't verify the science, but it certainly makes sense that increasing one's breadth of experiences (and then discussing them) would create more "hooks" on which to hang new knowledge, thus exponentially increasing the amount a child (or anyone) learns -- not to mention making him a more interesting person. I also loved his theories on teaching kids to fail, although -- while I'd love my daughter to get involved in sports when she gets older -- I'm not convinced that sports are for everyone or that this is the only way to go. Equally refreshing was his honesty with his kids about drugs, the need for certain school-learned knowledge, etc., and his encouragement of them to follow their own paths and speak their minds even if that meant receiving bad grades or disapprobation.

I did have a couple of beefs, however: First, I don't think that encouraging your preschooler to read before they're ready is a good idea. I recently finished "Your Child's Growing Mind" by Jane Healy, and she made a convincing argument that pushing reading before a child turns (around) 5 can cause the brain to use inferior processes, and that oftentimes reading problems (such as a lack of comprehension, or lack of interest) surface in kids who've been encouraged to read early. She calls this handing the child "a key to an unfinished garden," because a kid will struggle to crack the code of reading, only to find that, once learned, reading is very boring because they don't yet have the experience or comprehension skills to truly grasp the meaning of the text. (That said, she does say that some children devour reading at a very early age and will learn on their own without being pushed -- but this certainly isn't the norm.)

I also took issue with his suggestion to encourage children to run for student government, regardless of their interest. This would be anathema to some kids, and there are other ways to encourage leadership and community involvement.

Altogether, though, this book provided a lot of food for thought and was a great addition to my library.