From Library Journal
Kohn, a former teacher and now an award-winning author and education expert, here challenges the two important forces shaping American education today: the aggressive "back-to-basics" teaching approach that looks at children as passive receptacles into which facts and skills are poured, and the test-driven, "raising-the-bar" version, a heavy-handed push for "tougher standards." Drawing on a wealth of research as well as numerous stories from real classrooms, Kohn illustrates how each of these methods reflects a fundamental lack of understanding about how and why children learn. He also describes how the best teachers help students become critical, creative thinkers rather than filling them with forgettable facts or preparing them to take standardized tests. Parents as well as educators should read this remarkable book and rethink our most basic assumptions about the nature of learning and the possibilities of education in the 21st century. Recommended for all types of libraries.ASamuel T. Huang, Northern Illinois Univ. Libs., DeKalb
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Kohn, an outspoken critic of standardized tests as a means of measuring educational achievement, criticizes the "aggressive nostalgia" that supports misguided reforms and a return to back-to-basic concepts in education. He cites B. F. Skinner and Edward L. Thorndike as traditionalists, advocates of obedience to authority, rote memorization, and standardized tests. Nontraditionalists, such as John Dewey and Jean Piaget, advocate an unstructured, more active approach, with an emphasis on critical thinking. Kohn concedes that neither approach is in evidence in a pure form in any school system. But the pendulum in educational trends is currently at a decidedly conservative, "even reactionary," cycle. Kohn notes the backlash against any nontraditional effort when the accepted measure of quality education--standardized test scores--shows any decline. Urban schools and minority students are most scrutinized, most tested, and most vulnerable to the politics of school reform. Kohn advises parents and educators on how to critically examine teaching methods that emphasize achievement as measured by test scores. (See The Big Test in August 1999 Upfront.) Vanessa Bush
From Kirkus Reviews
Another blistering critique (after Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes, 1993) of traditional public schooling by a progressive who displays the same intellectual rigidity he abhors in others. In pithy, take-no-prisoners prose, Kohn mounts a frontal assault on what he calls the ``Old School,'' where teachers rely on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and grades to ``transmit'' a series of isolated facts and skills to their students. Rebutting those who believe that education should get ``back to basics,'' Kohn makes a persuasive case that the majority of schools never left them behind. The author also targets the ``tougher standards'' movement, arguing that a greater emphasis on standardized testing and other evaluations needlessly pits students against one another and ultimately leads to mediocrity. Since schools are already failing with this approach, why offer more of the same? Instead, Kohn, leaning heavily on John Dewey and Jean Piaget, proposes multiage, interdisciplinary classrooms where students work on projects and actively ``construct'' their own knowledge, teachers act as ``facilitators,'' and grades give way to performance-based evaluations. As presented here, however, Kohn's solution is just another brand of educational orthodoxy, the progressive version of the one-size-fits-all that currently afflicts the public schools. Oddly, for someone who decries simplistic thinking, Kohn does quite a bit of it. At one point, he frames the education debate this way: those who seek ``education for profit'' vs. those who seek ``education for democracy.'' (Guess which side he's on!) Worse, Kohn belittles everyone who doesn't agree with him. E.D. Hirsch, of cultural literacy fame, for example, is dismissed as the father of the ``bunch o' facts'' school. The harangue spills over into the book's lengthy appendix, in which the author debunks all the research he doesn't like, and even into the extensive footnotes, which endlessly recycle arguments made more effectively elsewhere. Though Kohn's zeal for reform is undeniable, in this book he seems content to preach to the progressive choir rather than persuade others to adopt his cause. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
The Schools Our Children Deserve forces us to reconsider most of what we thought we knew about education -- about homework and standardized testing, about phonics and what makes a good teacher. I want to hand this book to every parent in America and say, 'Before you send your child to school tomorrow, you must read this!' -- Deborah Meier, educational reformer and author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem
The Schools Our Children Deserve is a very important achievement, a powerful assault upon the mad excesses of the educational standards movement. It is a remarkable book that should become a classic in the field. -- Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities
Linda Perlstein comments that "the activities that he suggests are wonderful" and that Alphie's is "an inspiring philosophy." -- Review
From the Inside Flap
Are our schools in trouble because they have lowered their standards and strayed too far from the basics? Just the opposite, says Alfie Kohn: if American students are getting less than they deserve, it's due to simplistic demands to "raise the bar" and an aggressive nostalgia for traditional teaching. Alfie Kohn, the author of critically acclaimed works on such subjects as competition and rewards, now turns the conventional wisdom about education on its head. In this landmark book, he shows how the "back to basics" philosophy of teaching treats children as passive receptacles into which forgettable facts are poured. Likewise, shrill calls for Tougher Standards are responsible for squeezing the intellectual life out of classrooms. Such politicized slogans reflect a lack of understanding about how and why kids learn, and they force teachers to spend time preparing students for standardized tests instead of helping them to become critical, creative thinkers.
Kohn has an ambitious yet practical vision of what our children's classrooms could be like. Drawing on a remarkable body of research, he helps parents and others interested in education understand the need to move beyond a "bunch o' facts" model of teaching. Using stories from real classrooms, he shows how this can be done. Along the way, he offers surprising insights about the Whole Language-versus-phonics controversy, why a straight-A report card may not be good news, and how we can best gauge the progress of schools and students.
The Schools Our Children Deserve presents a fresh perspective on today's headlines about education--and on what our children will be asked to do in class tomorrow morning. It is a persuasive invitation to rethink our most basic assumptions about schooling.
About the Author
Alfie Kohn's six previous books include Punished by Rewards and No Contest: The Case Against Competition, as well as Beyond Displine and What to Look for in a Classroom. Descrilbed by Time magazine last year as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of educational fixation on grades and test scores," he is a popular lecturer, speaker to teachers, parents, and reasearchers accross the country. The author currently resides in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
FORWARD ... INTO THE PAST
Abigail is given plenty of worksheets to complete in
class as well as a substantial amount of homework.
She studies to get good grades, and her school is
proud of its high standardized test scores.
Outstanding students are publicly recognized by the
use of honor rolls, awards assemblies, and bumper
stickers. Abigail's teacher, a charismatic lecturer,
is clearly in control of the class: students raise
their hands and wait patiently to be recognized. The
teacher prepares detailed lesson plans well ahead of
time, uses the latest textbooks, and gives regular
quizzes to make sure kids stay on track.
What's wrong with this picture? Just about
everything.
The features of our children's classrooms that we
find the most reassuring--largely because we
recognize them from our own days in school--typically
turn out to be those least likely to help students
become effective and enthusiastic learners. That
dilemma is at the heart of education reform--or at
least at the heart of this book. On the relatively
rare occasions when nontraditional kinds of
instruction show up in classrooms, many of us become
nervous if not openly hostile. "Hey, when I was in
school the teacher was in front of the room, teaching
us what we needed to know about addition and adverbs
and atoms. We paid attention and studied hard if we
knew what was good for us. And it worked!"
Or did it? Never mind all those kids who gave up on
school and came to think of themselves as stupid. The
more interesting question is whether those of us who
were successful students "achieved this success by
memorizing an enormous number of words without
necessarily understanding them or caring about
them."' Is it possible that we are not really as well
educated as we'd like to think? Might we have spent a
good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was
exactly as pointless as we suspected it was at the
time?
It's not easy to acknowledge these possibilities,
which may help to explain the aggressive nostalgia
that is loose in the land. Any number of people
subscribe to the Listerine theory of education: the
old ways may be distasteful, but they're effective.
Doubtless, this belief is reassuring; unfortunately,
it's also wrong. Traditional schooling turns out to
be as unproductive as it is unappealing. Thus, we
ought to be demanding non-traditional classrooms for
our kids, and supporting teachers who know enough to
reject the siren call of "back to basics." We ought
to be asking why our children aren't spending more
time thinking about ideas and playing a more active
role in the process of learning. In such an
environment, they're not only more likely to be
engaged with what they're doing but also to do it
better.
Parents have rarely been invited to consider this
point of view, which is why schools continue
operating in pretty much the same way, using pretty
much the same set of assumptions and practices, as
the decades roll by. In this chapter, I'll try to
explain what traditional schooling is, then make the
case that it's still the dominant model in American
education and explain why this is so. After that,
I'll turn to a more recent, and closely related,
phenomenon: the widespread call to raise "standards"
that has come to dominate discussions about school
reform. Once we understand more about the support for
traditional teaching and for Tougher Standards--
arguably the two dominant forces in our educational
system--we'll be ready to analyze them critically and
explore alternatives that may make more sense for our
children.
Two Models of Schooling
Let us begin by acknowledging that there are as many
ways of teaching as there are teachers. Anyone who
attempts to apply a single set of labels to all
educators will be omitting some details and ignoring
some complications--not unlike someone who describes
politicians in terms of how far they are to the left
or right. Still, it isn't entirely inaccurate to
classify some classrooms and schools, some people and
proposals, as tilting toward a philosophy that is
more traditional or conservative as opposed to
nontraditional or progressive. The former might be
called the Old School of education, which of course
is not a building but a state of mind--and ultimately
a statement about the mind.
When asked what they think schools ought to look
like, some back-to-basics proponents cite the
importance of "obedience to authority" and list
certain favored classroom practices: "Students sit
together (usually in rows) and everyone follows the
same lesson. Missing are ... clusters of youngsters
working at a pace and on a topic of their own
choosing. In basics classrooms, lines of
responsibility are very clear; everyone knows his or
her task and recognizes who is in charge." The idea
is to have students memorize facts and definitions,
to make sure that skills are "drilled into" them.
Even in social studies, as one principal
explains, "We are much more concerned about teaching
where Miami is than about Miami's problem with
Cubans." Not all traditionalists would go quite that
far, but most would agree that schooling amounts to
the transmission of a body of knowledge from the
teacher (who has it) to the child (who doesn't), a
process that relies on getting the child to listen to
lectures, read textbooks, and, often, to practice
skills by completing worksheets.
Furthermore, "children should be behind their desks,
not roaming around the room. Teachers should be at
the head of the classrooms, drilling knowledge into
their charges."
In the Old School, reading lessons tend to teach
specific sounds, such as long vowels, in isolation;
math classes emphasize basic facts and calculations.
Academic fields (math, English, history) are taught
separately. Within each subject, big things are
broken down into bits, which are then taught in a
very specific sequence. The model also tends to
include traditional grades, plenty of tests and
quizzes, strict (punitive) discipline, competition
and lots of homework. Anything that deviates from
this model is often reviled as a fad, with special
scorn reserved for efforts to teach social skills or
address students' feelings, to have students learn
from one another, to use nontraditional ways of
assessing what they can do, as well as to adopt
bilingual education, a multicultural curriculum, or a
structure that brings together students of different
ages or abilities.
Nontraditional or progressive education is defined in
part by its divergence from all of this. Here, the
point of departure is that kids should be taken
seriously. Because learning is regarded as an active
process, learners are given an active role. Their
questions help to shape the curriculum, and their
capacity for thinking critically is honored even as
it is honed. In such classrooms, facts and skills are
important but not ends in themselves. Rather, they
are more likely to be organized around broad themes,
connected to real issues, and seen as part of the
process of coming to understand ideas from the inside
out. A classroom is a place where a community of
learners--as opposed to a collection of discrete
individuals--engages in discovery and invention,
reflection and problem solving.
These aspects of progressive education (and many
others, to be discussed in chapter 8) have been
around for a very long time--so long, in fact, that
they may actually define the more traditional
approach. For centuries, children learned by doing at
least as much as by listening. Hands-on activities
sometimes took place in the context of a mentor-
apprentice relationship and sometimes in a one-room
schoolhouse with plenty of cooperative learning among
kids of different ages. Many aspects of the Old
School, meanwhile, really aren't so old: "The
isolated-skills approach to learning," for
example, "was, in fact, an innovation that started in
the 1920s."'
What we may as well continue to call the traditional
approach (if only to avoid confusion) represents an
uneasy blend of behaviorist psychology and
conservative social philosophy. The former,
associated with such men as B. F. Skinner and Edward
L. Thorndike (who never met a test he didn't like),
is based on the idea that people, like other
organisms, do only what they have been reinforced for
doing. "All behavior is ultimately initiated by the
external environment,"' as the behaviorists see it--
and anything other than behavior, anything that isn't
observable, either isn't worth our time or doesn't
really exist. Learning is just the acquisition of
very specific skills and bits of knowledge, a process
that is linear, incremental, measurable. It says the
learner should progress from step to step in a
predictable sequence, interrupted by frequent testing
and reinforcement, with each step getting
progressively more challenging.
It's a straight shot from a theory like that to a
reliance on worksheets, lectures, and standardized
tests. On the other hand, not all proponents of
worksheets, lectures, and standardized tests consider
themselves behaviorists. In some cases, traditional
educational practices are justified in terms of
philosophical or religious beliefs. There is no
single seminal figure responsible for an emphasis on
order and obedience in the classroom, but the idea
that education should consist of transmitting a body
of information is today promoted most visibly by E.
D. Hirsch, Jr., a man best known for specifying what
facts every first-grader, second-grader, third-
grader, and so on ought to know.
In the case of progressive education, it can safely
be said that two twentieth-century individuals, John
Dewey and Jean Piaget, have shaped the way we think
of this movement. Dewey (1859-1952) was a philosopher
who disdained the capital-letter abstractions of
Truth and Meaning, preferring to see these ideas in
the context of real human purposes. Thinking, he
argued, is something that emerges from our shared
experiences and activities: it is what we do that
animates what we know. Dewey was also interested in
democracy as a way of living, not just as a form of
government. In applying these ideas to education, he
made the case that schools shouldn't be about handing
down a collection of static truths to the next
generation but about responding to the needs and
interests of the students themselves. When you do
that, he maintained, you won't have to bribe,
threaten, or otherwise artificially induce them to
learn (as is routinely done in traditional
classrooms).
Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist,
demonstrated that the way children think is
qualitatively different from the way adults think and
argued that a child's way of thinking progresses
through a series of distinct stages. Later in his
life, he began to analyze the nature of learning,
describing it as a two-way relationship between a
person and the environment. All of us develop
theories or perspectives through which we understand
everything we encounter, yet those theories are
themselves revised on the basis of our experience.
Even very young children play an active role in
making sense of things, "constructing" reality rather
than just acquiring knowledge.
These two basic approaches rarely show up in pure
form, with schools being completely traditional or
nontraditional. The defining features of traditional
education don't always appear together, or at least
not with equal emphasis. Some decidedly Old School
teachers assign essays as well as worksheets; others
downplay rote memorization. Likewise, some
progressive classrooms emphasize individual discovery
more than cooperation among students. Even from a
theoretical perspective, what appears at a distance
to be a unified school of thought turns out, as you
approach it, to be more like a teeming collection of
factions that accept some common principles but
loudly disagree about a good many others.
Still, those common principles are worth exploring.
There is a very real contrast between behaviorism
and "constructivism," the latter having grown out of
Piaget's investigations. The things that teachers do
can usefully be described as more consistent with one
theory of learning or the other. Likewise, there is a
marked difference between classrooms that are
relatively authoritarian or "teacher-centered" and
those that are more "learner-centered," in which
students play a role in making decisions. It's
therefore worth thinking about the philosophy that
predominates in the schools to which we send our
kids.
Copyright (c) 1999 Alfie Kohn. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
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