Customer Reviews

The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education

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

 

 

I couldn't help but feel compelled to write a review after I read the previous review. If you like Dewey or Adler, you will really enjoy this book. Sizer draws from both Dewey and Adler's ideas and points out all the problems with education today. Sizer has years of experience in various areas of education which does nothing more than to give his words even more value. The book is written in first person, so you actually get to live through some of his experiences which brings him to his idea of reformed education. Sizer's coalition of essential schools are interesting and provide one of the best models for education up until this point. If you want to find more information about this model before reading the book, look up Coalition of Essential Schools. They are charter schools located throughout the U.S. that are using this model. This is a must read for anyone who wants to read about contemporary education and understand where we have come from. This book isn't that negative as the previous reader mentioned. It is no more negative than Dewey's "Experience and Education."

Theodore Sizer and his wife were intimately involved in just about every aspect of education reform from the 1950's till his death in 2007. He even connects to some earlier reform efforts through his father. And, to add to his credentials, it must be added that Sizer did just about every job in the education world from high school teacher to school principal to college professor and, lastly, founder of a charter movement. Along the way Sizer also found time to observe thousands of classrooms and interview thousands of students. Those quotes are sprinkled throughout his many books.
This, his last book, is hopeful. Given that many of his best contemporaries including John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and Gerald Bracey embraced varying degrees of pessimism about American education it is interesting that Sizer never joined them. In Red Pencil Sizer asks the 64 dollar question: if so much of our system is screwed up why isn't anyone willing to take the risk of trying to do something different? He gives various explanations all revolving around people's fear of change and risk. Then, in the last chapter, Sizer says, you know what? Some people are really trying to change things--charter schools like the one he founded based upon principles outlined in this book. You will have to decide whether you think Sizer's principles can save American education, or at least move it in a positive direction. Sizer, himself, was hopeful that the charter movement was empowering some individuals to "discomfort the guardians of the status quo", but he also recognized that there were plenty of people trying to keep that status quo intact. Who will win--or whether there will be a clear winner--remains to be seen.

I cannot agree with Sizer. My goal as a mathematics professor is for the students to understand the material, starting from the principles, and applying the logic. We need to examine the principles for empirical verification. In order to accomplish any goal, we must clearly state the goal at the outset. The goal of education is rational thinking. This is true for the most part, even though there are other parts, such as sports and arts. How do we state the goal? By asking ourselves, "What's the problem?" See Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better: Things to Help Students Think and To Do Better in School and In Life for a discussion of this point. What is rational thinking, our educational goal, the failure of which leads to the downfall of society? See the new book, Rational Thinking, Government Policies, Science, and Living. Rational thinking starts with clearly stated principles, continues with logical deductions, and then examines empirical evidence to possibly modify the principles.

However, there are plenty of interesting statements. Here are a few:

p. 15. "What counts is with whom a young person consorts and what images invade his world."

p. 23. "Virtually all of the media intrusion is attached to commerce. Much of it is advertising, and advertising, if not by definition then by demonstrable practice, marches at the edges of deceit, teaching a dubious moral message.

p. 112. "Data emerging from forty years of research strongly suggest that no child's accomplishment can be accurately and fairly assessed by a single test.

I first encountered Ted Sizer's views on education in his course on The American School at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Fall of 1963. The idea that most surprised me was his desire to model Harvard's role in American education after that taken by Dewey and his disciples who had trained a high number of America's superintendents during an earlier era. He told us that those of us in the M.A. in Teaching program had been selected in part because we would go on to leadership in various schools and school systems, and could effect change. We would carry the "message" of Harvard regarding our respective disciplines and about the running of the schools as a whole. This struck me then, and still does, as an essentially egotistical concept of his role in education. It was more about power than about educational vision. His role as a reformer trying to dominate and change the schools of the country has continued throughout the years.
In his writings, he usually focuses on the negative. There is something so basically flawed about the schools it must be weeded out. Yet, it is hard to pin down exactly what is wrong. Sometimes, along with Robert Coles and others, he seems to opine that there are so many youths who are alienated by the system. When I taught in Dedham High School in Massachusetts years ago, one teen declared that he was "an outlaw." He wanted to get a mobile home and a motorcycle and ride rootlessly around the country "like a rolling stone." Sometimes Sizer writes as though he wants to change the system in order not to lose youths like this one. Other times, he is concerned with the cynicism of the better students, who have learned to play the system to their advantage. They have learned to manipulate the system in order to "succeed," but a true ideal of excellence is missing from their value system, or even a true love of learning.
He is bothered by the bureaucracy, but it's not that there is just too much paperwork or too much micromanagement, or a lack of disciplinary follow through and guts in punishing the guilty. Rather, I often sense from reading Sizer's writings that the bureaucracy is a mindset he abhors. It is a mindset of mediocrity and of trying to manage or enclose an educational process that is more exciting and open-ended than is realized.
In short, he seems to feel for the past forty-plus years that education is not living up to what it could and should be. Yet, he never clearly articulates what it could and should be. Rather, he is inviting us, and all potential fellow reformers, to catch his vision that there is a dynamic and an excellence beyond what we now have, even if the parameters of that dynamic and that excellence cannot be fully enunciated. He's kind of an educated Rodney King.."if we could all just get together, then what a beautiful world it could be." But it ain't a beautiful world although there is beauty in it. A more healthy and robust philosophy is needed to adjust to the wickedness that is out there.
He does not call for implementation of a more moral world view as did Pestalozzi. He does not promote the adaptation of the individual to democracy as does Dewey. He does not promote radical freedom of the individual like the Summerhill crowd. He does not advocate integration like Martin Luther King, Jr. He does not challenge us to intensify the scientific application of psychology to learning as does Herbart. Nor, does he advocate the arts as a path to wholeness in the educational life of a growing human being like Rudolf Steiner. Since I studied with him in 1963, I do not see articulated positive goals, but only the sense that if one is smart enough and progressive enough then he or she will see how to reform and improve this or that school or school system, because the given is that they all need reform. His "new vision" really is no vision, but only the promise that if you work with him your schools will get better in all kinds of ways. They will be revitalized. In fact, if I were to give a rubric for his ideas, I would say they come under the heading of "revitalizing the schools." However, the rub is that the notion is vague and even mystical. It ultimately depends upon trusting him and those who agree with him. He has good points to make yet lacks overriding substance in terms of goals or purpose.
Lastly, it is worth noting that Sizer is not "above the fray." Though certain of his points might be considered acceptable to conservative or liberal theories of education, he is in the liberal camp. Why can't Johnny read? Answer: The schools are boring, have mediocrity as their standard, have untalented administrators and teachers, lack funding,
are mired in local values and premises that are invalid and provincial, and have arcane rules that inhibit rather than enhance educational practice. Almost every aspect of pedagogy, administration, testing, discipline, parent-school relations, curriculum, guidance, and legal structure is wrong. Why can't Johnny tell right from wrong? Answer: Pretty much the same as the answer for why Johnny can't read.
Ted Sizer sees very little that is good about education as it has evolved in America. His slant is leftward. His sense that the individual can only be fixed by reforming the whole is ill-conceived and based on many philosophical mis-assumptions.
His sense that the traditional classroom is a place of failed expectations and rampant denial is excessively negative. His hope for America based on his envisioned educational reforms is futile.