NAS president Peter Wood has published a review of Diane Ravitch's new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. The book outlines Ravitch's change of heart regarding education reform. Here is an excerpt from Dr. Wood's review:
Ignorance is easy. Left to themselves, most children do not become literate. They don’t learn math. They don’t drink in large amounts of history. Basic ideas about how the world works remain beyond their reach. And ignorant children grow up to be ignorant adults—provided they survive the sometimes perilous passage. To combat this natural frailty, every group of people from time immemorial has organized some way to get the little ones—squirming, distracted, cranky, bored, breathless, or all at once—to pay attention. “This is rock worth chipping, and here’s how to chip it.” “Eat the root, not the leaves.” Civilization eventually acquired a lot of knowledge that seemed worth preserving. To get the children ready for this intellectual inheritance, civilization invented schools. They are an artificial contrivance intended to do a more or less difficult thing: organize the brains of young primates to perform unnatural acts such as reading and long division. That’s my view as an anthropologist. Schooling is, inevitably, difficult—and more difficult for some children than for others. The difficulty is a mystery only if you begin with the assumption that children are just so bursting with curiosity that, absent some external check on their eagerness, they will take to the alphabet as readily as infants take to climbing and crawling. But we are climbers and crawlers by nature and alphabet spelunkers only by outside intervention. When we learn to read, we are at one end of a long cultural rope that extends back though history beyond Shakespeare’s Stratford Grammar School, past Aristotle troubling young Alexander, to whatever lessons were taught in the cuneiform academy for Sumer’s scribes. Literacy has always been an achievement—and often a precarious one. I mention this by way of coming alongside a book of groaning frustration by one of America’s best-known advocates of school reform.
Read the review in its entirety at NAS.org or The American Conservative.
