Customer Reviews

Scrooge Meets Dick and Jane

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Instead of a frontal assault on the misguided notion that testing is needed in K-12 -- a strategy that clearly has failed since for the next 4 years, at least, we will have more testing and thus much less learning -- Schank tells us a story. A story that portrays the evil of testing at a personal level; a wonderful family is destroyed by the pressures brought about by trying to "do good on those tests." Literally, there were tears in my eyes. This little book makes a MOST compelling, Dickensonian, case for why our craze for testing in K-12 is horrific, wicked, and downright evil.

This is an extraordinary book, at once very sad, and very funny. Schank draws on Dickens' A Christmas Carol to tell a tale where the head of the Educational Testing Service is visited by the ghost of John Dewey (the famous American educator and advocate of learning by doing.) Dewey sends the ghosts of education past, present, and future to haunt Scrooge. They show how education started in this country as political indoctrination and gradually became about preparation for college. Today's schools have lost both purposes and are now about test preparation. Schank shows how this test madness will likely end, but, he says, there is hope for us all, and he explains how we need to understand why we have built what we have built so we can build something new its in place.

If you want to know what's most threatening about today's educational trends and, more important, what to do about it, rush to get this book. The author, one of the foremost thinkers about cutting edge edcuational issues in the world today, sounds an alarm that must be heard before our policy-makers lead a generation of children and their teachers down a path that ends in a black hole of unpreparedness for the challenges of work and life in the 21st century. All done in an engaging style, too. Don't miss it!

With wit and wisdom, Schank hits the nail on the head. Our schools are teaching nothing but test taking, a skill no one needs, wants, or will ever use in real life. If only President Shrub would read, and understand, this book! How much time, money and worry would be saved!

This is a wonderful failure of a book. It is a heroic and searing assault on our decrepit educational system that we should all heed. However, the Dickensonian language and plot don't quite work. Schank is a fine writer (see his "Coloring Outside the Lines") but he is no novelist. The book is crammed with interesting stories and facts about the evolution of the modern curriculum which alone is worth the read. Schank's vision of education without standardized tests is a welcomed alternative to today's depraved political debate on educational standards. Recommend for educators and parents.