Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating

by Frank Furedi

Never has so much attention been devoted to education. Everyone government ministers, social commentators and parents obsess about its problems. Yet we rarely ask why? Why is education a source of such concern? Why do many of the solutions proposed actually make matters worse?

Tony Blair's 'education, education, education' slogan placed education at the forefront of political agendas. But, perhaps the 'policisation' of education is part of the problem. Today, education is valued for its potential contribution to economic development, but it is no longer considered important for itself. Increasingly, the promotion of education has little to do with the value of learning per se or with the importance of 'being taught' about societies' achievements, so future generations have the intellectual ability to advance still further. Education has been emptied of its content.

This book is a brilliant piece of analysis. It peers into the hollowness of the education debates and, drawing on thinkers from the ancient Greeks to modern critics, it sets out what we need from our schools.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Politics

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Frank Furedi is a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, UK.

Reviews

[Rose]

I found that this picked up in interest further into the book, with the sections on socialisation being more interesting.

However, it's clear that Furedi is speaking from the armchair. He doesn't seem to have, or to access, much direct knowledge of what's going on in schools. The book as a whole is theoretical, repetitive, and pretty dry.

He repeatedly criticises teachers for having difficulty handling violent young children or persistent low-level disruption. He believes that reflects teachers' weakness and inadequacy, because surely these are trivial and timeless problems that are easily resolved by any competent educator. I'd like him to give it a try: take some of the challenging classes I have, and see how easy you find it. If you're not willing to do that, take seriously the reports of people who do do it every day and know what they're talking about.

[Sue Lyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank furedi is a professor of sociology so I would have expected more evidence-based support for his very strong opinions. I found it off-putting that he frequently cited newspaper headlines to support his arguments and drew extensively on some sources whilst giving the impression of much wider evidence for his assertions. This is a polemic and written in a popular style - not appealing to an academic audience, but not sure who the lay audience would be. Lots of criticism of the rise of therapeutic education and mourning for the demise of adult authority, at first I thought I was reading a right ght wing commentary until I looked up his card-carrying Marxist credentials. I don't disagree with much of what he says, but his major thesis that adult authority is undermined and that is a bad thing for education is asserted not explained. I need a more scholarly, educational analysis and explanation to be convinced that this is the key to what is wrong with education today. Fully support his call for education to cease being subject to the whims of political parties, for teachers to be given a chance to educate rather than merely be required to implement policies and pedagogical experiments, but that's not going to happen any time soon. So we are left feeling thoroughly depressed about every aspect of our schools. There must be some good stuff going on somewhere!

[Francis Fish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Furedi tries to work out how, after an inordinate amount of money and talent has been thrown at the problem, educational standards do not seem to have improved one jot and lots of young people leave school demotivated and passive.

His central thesis is that education is a contract between the young and the old, where the old give the young the tools to understand and run the society they live in and carry it the contract forward to their children in turn.

What's happened is that education has been hijacked for all kinds of other purposes like propagandising health messages and reverse socialising parents not to smoke (for example). Crude social engineering and political correctness have replaced the more balanced curricula of yore, which weren't perfect but did engage the mind. The money has been spent on ensuring that these schemes, and all the data collection and top-down nagging and checking needed to enforce them, have been implemented. Not on education itself.

There has also been the perception that the old Liberal Arts education (which most of the governing elite have been recipients of, by the way) is too hard, so it has been broken down into bite sized tasks that can be taught monkey-see-monkey-do to anybody who can repeat the chunks back to an examiner. This has been done as a kind of reverse-snobbery exercise against "elitism", and has disengaged the minds of the children. They know how to do things but not why.

As a personal aside, it's no wonder kids are not engaged, it must be really boring to be on the receiving end of this, and it must also be quite upsetting to be condescended to in this way by people who obviously know far better than you do what you are capable of. It occurred to me that chunking things down like this allows bigger class sizes and is much cheaper than doing it properly, and I suspect that that is the real reason. They are training people to be better factory workers, following tedious processes all day and not having to show any initiative, in a world where all the factories are gone and no initiative means no food. This is the tragedy.

I can't comment on the veracity of the facts and figures he quotes because I am not an academic and have not studied the area in any detail. Some of the leading pedagogues he quotes condemn themselves out of their own mouths and seem unable to see that they have done so. It's quite shocking that they show such a lack of rigour, and then see fit to say how our children should be educated.

[Jane Dugger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointment and a very dry read. It could have used a good editor. What few points the author made could have been done with less paper.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. I feel the author has a good grasp of the social constructs of the failures of education but not a strong grasp on the challenges teachers face. I think he needs to investigate more real classrooms in order to properly diagnose the issues, rather than relying on third hand advice via newspapers and popular media to remedy issues that have little to do with teachers.

[Olive Rickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I particularly enjoyed the section on authority and how authority can be a positive thing in education as schools are places where we take responsibility for children’s education and welfare which they cannot learn through their own experiences. This loss of authority feeds into denigrating of subject knowledge as being indicative of a wider problem of seeing schools as primarily institutions of socialisation rather than education which is reflected in standards of education being arbitrarily measured by exams. The reduction in standards is often attributed to symptoms of the problem rather than its causes. It also points to the many directions teachers are pulled to perform the role of therapists, childminders and parents . As such the role of schools and teachers becomes synonymous with any other adult in society.

Furedi rightly points out this cannot be technocratically resolved by central government with tweaks around the edges of the curriculum. Particularly because often common values about society and education are often poorly defined.

While I enjoyed his prognosis there is no meaningful solutions proposed except calling upon individual teachers to take their roles as educators ‘seriously’ and end to pedagogy and “experts”. Despite his advocacy for a knowledge based curriculum Furedi fails to propose a curriculum that would be free of controversy and engender knowledge, mostly because knowledge cannot exist in a vacuum. as such debates on what should be taught in schools will remain fraught.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a decent introduction to education theory but it doesn’t really scrape past the surface, and the writing is a touch lacklustre. It could have done with more references and explanations of key points. But as a first foray it’s ok.

[Saša Potisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sicer raziskano v VB in ZDA, a kaj ko vse brez premisleka in izbire uvažamo k nam... Mnoge stvari so že tukaj, ostalo očitno še pride. Grozljivka.

[René P. Bosman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Voor iedeen die in het onderwijs zit een erg interesant boek over de invloed van onze huidige tijd op ons onderwijs. Vernieuwingen, lessen in geluk, leren leren, etc. Hoe pedagogen het onderwijs socialiseren en hoe het onderwijs zijn doelstelling voorbij schiet. Terug naar onderwijzen en stoppen met al dat diagnosticeren van leerlingen. Interesant boek. Geeft absoluut niet alle antwoorden maar goed om eens een duidelijk onderbouwt verhaal als tegenhanger te horen van al dat zogenaamde vernieuwen binnen het onderwijs.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good points, but I definitely did not agree with everything in this book.