The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"

The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"

Mariner Books, 288 pp., $14 (paper)

In Texas -- and indeed, in the U.S. -- our public education system is killing our kids' ability and interest in learning. In fact, just stroll into the school of your choice and you'd be hard-pressed to find a classroom that doesn't look, sound, smell, and feel exactly like the one where you spent so many of your uninspired days. But hey, that's the way the mavens of The Old School, aka The Back-to-Basics Movement, like it. It was bad enough for them, it's bad enough for their kids. And yours.

That's according to researcher, writer, and lecturer Alfie Kohn (himself a former high school teacher) in The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards." Drawing upon hundreds of sources -- scientific studies, scholarly articles and books -- Kohn skillfully exposes the real status quo in American education. Fortunately enough, however, he also proposes a way out of the darkness.

Isn't the problem that we don't have high enough standards for kids? Nope, says Kohn. The Old School, which worships "achievement" measured by grades and test scores, "create[s] a climate that is not conducive to intellectual exploration," he writes. Students who grub for grades, rather than for understanding, become less creative, less cooperative, and less willing to take risks -- hardly the characteristics that employers of the 21st century supposedly value in prospective employees.

All right, but what about acquiring the basics, since kids these days seem to be so stupid? Kohn counters that not only do we not need to go "back" to basics (since we've never really left them), flogging children with facts and skills stripped from context leaves kids cold and turned off to school. (Hey, weren't you?)

In fact, flogging is an apt image when it comes to describing the harm standardized testing does. Besides harboring the reasonable suspicion that these exams measure knowledge that isn't especially sophisticated, Kohn points out that what happens after the scores come in (especially poor scores for poor children) is more of the same: more drills, more boring worksheets, more repetition of disconnected facts, more teachers and principals running scared of administrators and running afoul of the rules (witness the recent cheating and fudging of scores that has taken place since TAAS-mania hit Texas). This is "real-world" education? Not surprisingly, Kohn's first suggestion for turning this ship of fools around is to loosen the grip of standardized testing -- if not abandon it altogether. He also suggests boycotting the test in your state. (In April this year, dozens of students in Massachusetts did just that.) His other suggestion: Let teachers let students learn the way they do it best -- by talking together, asking questions, discovering things on their own in their own time, and making mistakes without having to worry about what grade they'll get or how they'll do on the TAAS.

Kohn is without question one of the most cogent critics of education today, and every sentence of his witty, sparkling writing contains a fact or food for thought. Although Kohn's vision of a "New School" would serve primary and secondary students well, it's not clear how those students would be prepared for the drudgery of college. But I'm so convinced that he and other progressive critics are right, that I'm willing to find out.