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Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School – The Classic Call for Better Schools, Smaller Classes, and Education Reform
First published in 1984, this best-selling classic is Theodore Sizer's eloquent call to arms for school reform. In a new preface, Sizer addresses the encouraging movements afoot today for better schools, smaller classes, and fully educated students. Yet, while much has changed for the better in the classroom, much remains the rushed classes, mindless tests, overworked teachers. Sizer's insistence that we do more than just compromise for our children's educational futures resonates just as strongly today as it did two decades ago.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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August 28, 2010
Having never posted a comment on this site before, but now being inspired to do so because of this one book should be a witness in itself to how much I was moved by this piece of writing. Sizer seems to have filled this book with eloquent and passionate explanations of every thought that I have ever had concerning America's schools, and more importantly, every thought that I have only felt over the horizon but never been able to fully grasp or put into words.
If I could say one thing about Sizer's work (and it's hard to pick just one), I would say that its power is in the simplicity of the problems he observes and the solutions he suggests. When he walks through our schools, he simply sees, as so many more see (or ought to see), that "real learning just doesn't happen this way." Some of his best examples involve how newly hired laborers are taught the skills of farming, or aspiring craftsmen the skills of carpentry, or (my favorite example because it puts the answer right under our noses) how coach's teach their players the knowledge and skills required for whatever sport they coach. None of these educational scenarios, neither the farming of land nor the working of wood nor the playing of sports, takes an approach that even remotely resembles the rituals of American schools.
Though it is a critique of schools, it is not a pessimistic read. In fact, it has really helped inform the things that I am doing in my own classroom. It woke me up to some great truths about many things, such as:
1. What assessments really are for and how they should look.
2. How teaching is so personal that it can never look the same way twice.
3. How learning by doing is often the best, or maybe the only way.
4. How students rarely are encouraged to see a "big picture" as they jump from class to class to "pick up" knowledge. Even basic connections are either non-existent or, at best, superficial.
So much more to say, but luckily the book says it all. Maybe everything from the front cover to the back is not perfectly true, but it certainly got me thinking in the right direction as far as truly helping my students is concerned.
If I could say one thing about Sizer's work (and it's hard to pick just one), I would say that its power is in the simplicity of the problems he observes and the solutions he suggests. When he walks through our schools, he simply sees, as so many more see (or ought to see), that "real learning just doesn't happen this way." Some of his best examples involve how newly hired laborers are taught the skills of farming, or aspiring craftsmen the skills of carpentry, or (my favorite example because it puts the answer right under our noses) how coach's teach their players the knowledge and skills required for whatever sport they coach. None of these educational scenarios, neither the farming of land nor the working of wood nor the playing of sports, takes an approach that even remotely resembles the rituals of American schools.
Though it is a critique of schools, it is not a pessimistic read. In fact, it has really helped inform the things that I am doing in my own classroom. It woke me up to some great truths about many things, such as:
1. What assessments really are for and how they should look.
2. How teaching is so personal that it can never look the same way twice.
3. How learning by doing is often the best, or maybe the only way.
4. How students rarely are encouraged to see a "big picture" as they jump from class to class to "pick up" knowledge. Even basic connections are either non-existent or, at best, superficial.
So much more to say, but luckily the book says it all. Maybe everything from the front cover to the back is not perfectly true, but it certainly got me thinking in the right direction as far as truly helping my students is concerned.
January 16, 2016
This is classic reading about reforming school.
ILL, LA 222.S53 2004
founder of Coalition of Essential Schools essentialschools.org, based on Brown University
p225 9 Principles
Focus; Simple goals; Universal goals; Personalization; Student-as-worker; Diploma by exhibition; Attitude; Staff; Budget.
My summary:
1) till this point after I have read education books no less than 70 books, finally I understand what education is truly about. One phrase: intuitive critical thinking , whether it is how to form new ideas, or make the reasonable critique based on knowledge learned. I have to admit this goal even in definition is hard to pin down, let alone to invent measurement to achieve this. But nerveless it is the goal of all those great and wise educators strive for.
2) A thorough analysis of American High School in 4 areas: Students, Programs, Teachers, Structure. American high schools are grouped by age (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior), 36,000 minutes per year, 720 school days over 4 years, 50 minutes block time, 7 periods, covered subjects English ( each year), Social Studies ( 3 out 4 years), Physical Education ( 3 out 4 years), Mathematics (1 or 2 years), Science ( 1 or 2 years).
3)This book is cry of overload of the teachers' job, force teachers to comprise education goals, which well defined at least in rhetorical form.
I Students
4. Docility
p54 The hungry student is the constructively skeptical student....The constructive skeptic can be unsettling to all too many teachers, who may find him cheeky and disruptive. Questing can be costly.
p56 Charles Silberman, in his book Crisis In The Classroom, The Remaking of American Education, one central chapter titled "Education for docility". He argued that the students quickly learn that it takes to survive in school, and that is to conform to what the system and its teachers wants. "The most important strategy for survival is docility and conformity." "Docility is not only encouraged but frequently demanded, for teachers and administrators seem unable to distinguish between authority and power. "The tragedy is that the great majority of students do not rebel,; they accept the stultifying rules, the lack of privacy, the authoritarianism, the abuse of power,".....The school may be anesthetizing the students, There's not enough stimulus.... Notices the increasing blandness of debate clubs and students newspapers. Many schools are quite, apparently happy , orderly, but intellectually dull. ... Allows students to "practice stupidity as long as they don't become discipline problem... .. Education has become a massive process for produce passive minds.
II The program
p86 The essential claims are: literary, numeracy, and civic understanding.
p105 Intuitive thinking Jerome Bruner , among psychologists the most persuasive advocate of Intuitive thinking, put it well in his book The Process of Education
In contrast to analytic thinking, intuitive thinking characteristically does not advance in careful, well-defined steps. It tends to involved maneuvers based on seemingly on implicit perception of total problem.... Usually intuitive thinking rests on familiarity with the domain of knowledge involved and with its structure, which makes it possible for the thinker to leap about, skipping steps and employing short cuts in a manner that requires a later rechecking of conclusions by more analytic means . . . Unfortunately, the formulation of school learning has somehow devalued intuition. -- My comment: it is really Jun wants to teach.
Schools value strictly orderly thinking. the computer, with its special form of algorithmic "reasoning", reinforces this predilection. some adults in schools dismiss all other kinds of thinking as playing around, making mudpies. For them, intuition and imagination are not really serous pursuits. The trail-and-error procedures involved are messy. According, they get short shrift in far too many schools, with sad costs to the individuals and their communities.
p114 Whitehead spoke of
The fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and this if Life in all its manifestation. Instead of this single unit, we offer children -Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing flows; Science, from which nothing follows; History,from which nothing follows; A Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life?
p132 I would organize a high school into 4 areas or large departments:
1. Inquiry and Expression
2. Mathematics and science
3. Literature and arts
4. Philosophy and history
III The teachers
p151 Nearly all formal learning in schools involves the interactions of 3 actors: the student, the teacher, the subject of their mutual attention. The character of this triangle is subject to change, varying from pupil to pupil, teacher to teacher, subject to subject, day to day, even minute to minute. Change any one of the triangle's members, and others have to shift, to accommodate, or even break apart.
my summary of teacher quality: bad prepared to be a good teacher.
p188 They (the students) become competent algebraic drone.s. They learn virtually nothing about mathematical inquiry or mathematical thinking, because I (the teacher) know virtually nothing about these things... Many high school teachers do not know their subjects. They teach, as I did, from day to day, and the textbook is the source of everything. Some teachers of cripplingly limited scholarship believe they are scholars and that they do know their subjects. They may have been victims of standardless college courses and were given A's and B's for work of dismay quality. As a result, they believe that they are competent, when in fact they are not. They is very little quality control in higher education, and it is difficult for many college students to know just how well they stack up as scholars in their fields. Institutions of high education are as victimized by credit-counting as are the high school. One can "earn" a B.A.in English at many colleges, for example, merely by accumulating so-and-so many credit hours in English, with no regard for which English courses these may be. Few colleges give cumulative general examinations, the only means the institutions have for ultimately ascertaining the breadth and depth of a student's knowledge.
The problem of scholarly competence takes on an even more difficult form after people have been teaching for some years. They have memorized the textbooks and convinced themselves that they know their disciplines. ...Teachers like these make curricular improvement monumentally difficult
IV The structure
p207 There are at least 6 defects in this system of pyramidal government
1. it forces us in large measure to overlook special local conditions
2. Bureaucracy depends on the specific, the measurable, such as standardization tests.
3. Large administrative units depend on norms, the bases of predictability. Inevitably, a central tendency becomes the rigid expectation.
4. Centralized planning requires a high level of specificity.
5. Bureaucracies lumber
6. Hierarchical Bureaucracy stifles initiative at base.
p214 There are 5 imperative for better schools
1. Give rooms to teachers and students to work and learn in their own, appropriate ways.
2. Insist that students clearly exhibit mastery of their school work.
3. Get the incentives right, for students and for teachers.
4. Focus the students' work on the use of their minds.
5. Keep the structure simple and thus flexible.
p221 Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.
Some terms:
1. The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education were 1918 by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education.
Books:
The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto by Mortimer J. Adler
The Technology Of Teaching by B.F. Skinner
The unheavenly city; the nature and future of our urban crisis by Edward C. Banfield (most controversial book , social class??)
The Unheavenly City Revisited : A Revision of the Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield
ILL, LA 222.S53 2004
founder of Coalition of Essential Schools essentialschools.org, based on Brown University
p225 9 Principles
Focus; Simple goals; Universal goals; Personalization; Student-as-worker; Diploma by exhibition; Attitude; Staff; Budget.
My summary:
1) till this point after I have read education books no less than 70 books, finally I understand what education is truly about. One phrase: intuitive critical thinking , whether it is how to form new ideas, or make the reasonable critique based on knowledge learned. I have to admit this goal even in definition is hard to pin down, let alone to invent measurement to achieve this. But nerveless it is the goal of all those great and wise educators strive for.
2) A thorough analysis of American High School in 4 areas: Students, Programs, Teachers, Structure. American high schools are grouped by age (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior), 36,000 minutes per year, 720 school days over 4 years, 50 minutes block time, 7 periods, covered subjects English ( each year), Social Studies ( 3 out 4 years), Physical Education ( 3 out 4 years), Mathematics (1 or 2 years), Science ( 1 or 2 years).
3)This book is cry of overload of the teachers' job, force teachers to comprise education goals, which well defined at least in rhetorical form.
I Students
4. Docility
p54 The hungry student is the constructively skeptical student....The constructive skeptic can be unsettling to all too many teachers, who may find him cheeky and disruptive. Questing can be costly.
p56 Charles Silberman, in his book Crisis In The Classroom, The Remaking of American Education, one central chapter titled "Education for docility". He argued that the students quickly learn that it takes to survive in school, and that is to conform to what the system and its teachers wants. "The most important strategy for survival is docility and conformity." "Docility is not only encouraged but frequently demanded, for teachers and administrators seem unable to distinguish between authority and power. "The tragedy is that the great majority of students do not rebel,; they accept the stultifying rules, the lack of privacy, the authoritarianism, the abuse of power,".....The school may be anesthetizing the students, There's not enough stimulus.... Notices the increasing blandness of debate clubs and students newspapers. Many schools are quite, apparently happy , orderly, but intellectually dull. ... Allows students to "practice stupidity as long as they don't become discipline problem... .. Education has become a massive process for produce passive minds.
II The program
p86 The essential claims are: literary, numeracy, and civic understanding.
p105 Intuitive thinking Jerome Bruner , among psychologists the most persuasive advocate of Intuitive thinking, put it well in his book The Process of Education
In contrast to analytic thinking, intuitive thinking characteristically does not advance in careful, well-defined steps. It tends to involved maneuvers based on seemingly on implicit perception of total problem.... Usually intuitive thinking rests on familiarity with the domain of knowledge involved and with its structure, which makes it possible for the thinker to leap about, skipping steps and employing short cuts in a manner that requires a later rechecking of conclusions by more analytic means . . . Unfortunately, the formulation of school learning has somehow devalued intuition. -- My comment: it is really Jun wants to teach.
Schools value strictly orderly thinking. the computer, with its special form of algorithmic "reasoning", reinforces this predilection. some adults in schools dismiss all other kinds of thinking as playing around, making mudpies. For them, intuition and imagination are not really serous pursuits. The trail-and-error procedures involved are messy. According, they get short shrift in far too many schools, with sad costs to the individuals and their communities.
p114 Whitehead spoke of
The fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and this if Life in all its manifestation. Instead of this single unit, we offer children -Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing flows; Science, from which nothing follows; History,from which nothing follows; A Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life?
p132 I would organize a high school into 4 areas or large departments:
1. Inquiry and Expression
2. Mathematics and science
3. Literature and arts
4. Philosophy and history
III The teachers
p151 Nearly all formal learning in schools involves the interactions of 3 actors: the student, the teacher, the subject of their mutual attention. The character of this triangle is subject to change, varying from pupil to pupil, teacher to teacher, subject to subject, day to day, even minute to minute. Change any one of the triangle's members, and others have to shift, to accommodate, or even break apart.
my summary of teacher quality: bad prepared to be a good teacher.
p188 They (the students) become competent algebraic drone.s. They learn virtually nothing about mathematical inquiry or mathematical thinking, because I (the teacher) know virtually nothing about these things... Many high school teachers do not know their subjects. They teach, as I did, from day to day, and the textbook is the source of everything. Some teachers of cripplingly limited scholarship believe they are scholars and that they do know their subjects. They may have been victims of standardless college courses and were given A's and B's for work of dismay quality. As a result, they believe that they are competent, when in fact they are not. They is very little quality control in higher education, and it is difficult for many college students to know just how well they stack up as scholars in their fields. Institutions of high education are as victimized by credit-counting as are the high school. One can "earn" a B.A.in English at many colleges, for example, merely by accumulating so-and-so many credit hours in English, with no regard for which English courses these may be. Few colleges give cumulative general examinations, the only means the institutions have for ultimately ascertaining the breadth and depth of a student's knowledge.
The problem of scholarly competence takes on an even more difficult form after people have been teaching for some years. They have memorized the textbooks and convinced themselves that they know their disciplines. ...Teachers like these make curricular improvement monumentally difficult
IV The structure
p207 There are at least 6 defects in this system of pyramidal government
1. it forces us in large measure to overlook special local conditions
2. Bureaucracy depends on the specific, the measurable, such as standardization tests.
3. Large administrative units depend on norms, the bases of predictability. Inevitably, a central tendency becomes the rigid expectation.
4. Centralized planning requires a high level of specificity.
5. Bureaucracies lumber
6. Hierarchical Bureaucracy stifles initiative at base.
p214 There are 5 imperative for better schools
1. Give rooms to teachers and students to work and learn in their own, appropriate ways.
2. Insist that students clearly exhibit mastery of their school work.
3. Get the incentives right, for students and for teachers.
4. Focus the students' work on the use of their minds.
5. Keep the structure simple and thus flexible.
p221 Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.
Some terms:
1. The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education were 1918 by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education.
Books:
The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto by Mortimer J. Adler
The Technology Of Teaching by B.F. Skinner
The unheavenly city; the nature and future of our urban crisis by Edward C. Banfield (most controversial book , social class??)
The Unheavenly City Revisited : A Revision of the Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield
July 23, 2013
Just because this book was written in 1984 doesn't make it any less relevant to the present. Is this a positive reflection on the author of the book, or a negative reflection on the schools for having the same problems as we did 30 years ago?
I actually semi-disagree with a lot of what he says, like his idea for merit pay and his analysis of why students go to school. I also felt like his portrayal of adolescents was incidentally accurate. But his points and arguments are all well-supported, which I respect. I really liked that I got to see the viewpoint of someone who, trained as a historian, can see the bigger picture, and also know the very real needs of teachers and principals in a suffocating system.
Of course, the point of writing this book was to endorse a "better" education. For him, that means mastery of all "subjects", without any swiss-cheese learning, in order to obtain a diploma and produce valuable members of society.
While it is true that the jobs of the future will require critical analysis and more brain-work than the jobs of the past, I want to ask of him, the author, if that is necessary for everyone. I am not advocating an elitist educational system, but if it's going to take so much time, attention, and money to bring all kids to a certain level of "mastery," why bother? Why not select just the kids who want to serve society in that way? What is so wrong with an "undemocratic" model of schooling? Just because that is the value that America was founded on does not mean it should be the ultimate goal of education. But then again, what should be the ultimate goal of education? No one agrees on that.
Commence rant.
I really wish people would stop fighting over who gets to control public education. Privitized or publicized, at least we can start working with leaders and establish goals. But in the state we are in right now, struggling for control, of course no reform is going to happen. People are too busy plotting, too preoccupied with themselves to focus on students. In order for any of the changes suggested in this book to take place (I feel a lot of them are definitely worth trying out), there has to be stability. Sizer agrees that stability is key to creating a learning environment. But then again, will it ever be possible to provide stability to students? Teacher unions will never give up power to people like Bill Gates, while he wastes millions of dollars trying to prove that he has a right to have a large say in public education. So I suppose the question again returns to how we can get people with big egos to get off their high horse.
I actually semi-disagree with a lot of what he says, like his idea for merit pay and his analysis of why students go to school. I also felt like his portrayal of adolescents was incidentally accurate. But his points and arguments are all well-supported, which I respect. I really liked that I got to see the viewpoint of someone who, trained as a historian, can see the bigger picture, and also know the very real needs of teachers and principals in a suffocating system.
Of course, the point of writing this book was to endorse a "better" education. For him, that means mastery of all "subjects", without any swiss-cheese learning, in order to obtain a diploma and produce valuable members of society.
While it is true that the jobs of the future will require critical analysis and more brain-work than the jobs of the past, I want to ask of him, the author, if that is necessary for everyone. I am not advocating an elitist educational system, but if it's going to take so much time, attention, and money to bring all kids to a certain level of "mastery," why bother? Why not select just the kids who want to serve society in that way? What is so wrong with an "undemocratic" model of schooling? Just because that is the value that America was founded on does not mean it should be the ultimate goal of education. But then again, what should be the ultimate goal of education? No one agrees on that.
Commence rant.
I really wish people would stop fighting over who gets to control public education. Privitized or publicized, at least we can start working with leaders and establish goals. But in the state we are in right now, struggling for control, of course no reform is going to happen. People are too busy plotting, too preoccupied with themselves to focus on students. In order for any of the changes suggested in this book to take place (I feel a lot of them are definitely worth trying out), there has to be stability. Sizer agrees that stability is key to creating a learning environment. But then again, will it ever be possible to provide stability to students? Teacher unions will never give up power to people like Bill Gates, while he wastes millions of dollars trying to prove that he has a right to have a large say in public education. So I suppose the question again returns to how we can get people with big egos to get off their high horse.
August 7, 2022
CAVEAT/QUALIFIER: I read this book for PD for salary advancement. It was first written in the 1980s.
That said, it is an accurate description of what could be improved in secondary education (class size, etc.) while defending the need for public education. I wish school board members and administrators would read this book and hear this argument.
That said, it is an accurate description of what could be improved in secondary education (class size, etc.) while defending the need for public education. I wish school board members and administrators would read this book and hear this argument.
August 18, 2018
A cogent argument for real educational reform through supporting and empowering teachers as professionals. Unfortunately overlooked in the mass-testing years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
February 7, 2020
This is the classic on high schools. It is from this book that the "less is more" coalition of Essential schools movement was born, along with the movement toward more local control. A must read for anyone interested in high school reform.
April 24, 2024
Must-read for anyone in education.
August 7, 2024
This was published in the 1980s. It’s heartbreaking to see that the only thing that’s changed about the teaching profession is that you’re not allowed to smoke in the break room anymore.
January 1, 2009
It's clear that the book is at least twenty years old, but that doesn't dilute its point: that the way high schools are set up is counterintuitive in many ways to the things we want high schoolers to learn and demonstrate in preparation for when we eventually drop them unceremoniously into the "real world." The author's solution is controversial to say the least, not to mention an unwieldy premise to consider implementing: that high schools allow students who demonstrate basic competency in literacy, numeracy, and citzenry be allowed to graduate if they so desire, and to offer excess courses in a blended and cooperative manner between disciplines. Sizer and colleagues actually set up what they call the Coalition of Essential Schools to try out some of their theories, and it is clear that I will need to do some more research into their results before I can throw my support fully behind his ideas.
November 4, 2012
This book about the state of the American High School was written in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, it describes a situation that is largely the same today. Its main point is that the structure and incentives of high school conspire to result in a compromise: the students won't demand too much from the teacher and the teacher won't demand too much from the students. Mediocrity and precious little learning is the predictable result. It was an important book, and I got a few good lesson ideas from it. But, l'm not certain it actually resolves the compromise.
May 15, 2012
We lost a light in education when we lost Ted Sizer. I heard these words repeated in some form or another when Sizer passed away. They weren't words I understood until I read Horace's Compromise this past semester. Sizer not only paints an accurate and detailed picture of traditional American public schools, he presents shifts of thinking and action that can help as well.
This has become one of the books I first recommend to teachers about to enter the classroom and non-teachers who want a starting place for understanding education and a primer on what progressive education can become.
This has become one of the books I first recommend to teachers about to enter the classroom and non-teachers who want a starting place for understanding education and a primer on what progressive education can become.
August 28, 2009
This is, comparatively, a very easy book to read about the subject of the problems of education. It is clear and smart. The author illustrates how the average high school teacher ends up with only a few minutes to devote to each student every week. He proposes a remedy, which he expands upon in subsequent books.
December 25, 2011
read this a few years ago ... within the cyclical nature of education, old ideas do become new once again. I enjoyed revisiting.If you liked this, I recommend Teaching Education and Academics at the turn of the century
May 28, 2013
This book legitimately alters my thinking about teaching. I think all pre-service teachers should read it as well as administrators. I don't know that all of Sizer's ideas can or will be embraced, but I know that individual teachers can certainly embrace the models he cites and critically evaluate their own teaching with his questions.
September 15, 2014
I can see why this book is a seminal text in education policy, but I was angered by many of its assumptions about teachers, namely that their reluctance about change is the real reason problems persist in schools. Teachers want change, but they want to be part of it, not have it dictated superficially by entities that are far from real classrooms and human children.
April 24, 2007
I never finished this one. It was too much theory for me and was also one too many things for me to do at a busy time. I'm thinking that now that I have four years of teaching behind me this might make more sense.
December 29, 2008
This book is a landmark illustration in the dilemma of teaching, especially lifelong teachers. What do you do to survive in a job that is near impossible in scope? What choices go through a person's head in this situation?
March 23, 2011
A gift from a dear friend I miss. The content of the book is reflected in the scratch piece of paper where I brainstormed options for my upcoming summer: work in an inner city school, internship, or a master's in teaching writing.
February 29, 2012
If you are an educator, this book is mandatory reading. Ted Sizer got it right, absolutely right, which is why this book is an education classic. Now if only the schools could get it right! We need more politicians to read and to talk about this book.
May 7, 2012
This was somewhat depressing as Sizer was writing 20 years ago and so much of what he wrote is still true today. When I looked at his list of what schools need to be successful, I realized that list hasn't changed except that society is possibly farther away from providing what he suggests.
July 6, 2007
I was really enjoying this book and was about half way thru when I had to return it to the library since I was moving out of state. I haven't found a copy available near my new residence yet. :(
January 31, 2008
If it wasn't so sadly true, it would almost be funny. All teachers should read this.
March 4, 2008
A must read for every teacher and educator!
February 16, 2014
A must read, teachers
June 29, 2009
An excellent treatment of the problems facing high school in America. Every high school teacher should read this.
Read
December 2, 2009I learned that yes--we are still in a dilemma
June 14, 2011
Just began for a grad class, but so far a good reminder of how high schools should look in theory...
June 13, 2011
Loved it. Love his ideas and wish we were more willing to start over with our educational system altogether
March 16, 2016
One of the books that helped me articulate my own concerns about present ways of school-keeping. Very enlightening and relevant.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews