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Ten Books on Education Worth Having
Published January 01, 2009 @ 08:01PM PT
It goes without saying that the following list will suffer sins of omission, but it's the product of input from a large number of dedicated educators. Feel free to add your recommendations in the comment thread.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916.
The classic vision of progressive, democratic education by one of America’s greatest philosophers. (Online version here.)
Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, 1992.
The classic exposé of the two-tier education system producing America’s “achievement gap,” Kozol’s tour of schools in inner cities, and his method of often letting students and teachers speak for themselves, is powerful and sobering.
Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform, 2003.
Lipman’s book is required reading for two reasons: first, written eleven years after Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, its case study of neo-liberal education reform in Chicago Public Schools makes it a solid companion to Kozol’s book. Second, the book is particularly timely, insofar as the “Chief Executive Officer” of the Chicago school system was none other than Arne Duncan, tapped by Barack Obama to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. Readers of Lipman’s book are treated to an in-depth tour of Duncan’s reforms up to 2002: school closures, charter schools, military schools, and more. Fore-warned is fore-armed. (Preview it on Google Books.)
Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work, 2001.
Experienced educator and Stanford professor Darling-Hammond, leader of Barack Obama’s educational transition team and favorite among progressives for Secretary of Education, lays out a comprehensive, research-based, student-centered vision of school reform - among the most forceful indictments of the NCLB, high-stakes testing,
education-as-business ideology. (Darling-Hammond’s essay for The Nation is a more condensed, but just as powerful, critique of NCLB.)
Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, 2008.
Tough’s book about a visionary community organizer’s campaign to improve Harlem schools from the grass-roots up serves, among other things, as an important reminder that governments and bureaucracies are not the only agents in school improvement. School communities - that means all of us - can commit to the cause in ambitious ways as well.
Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes, 2001.
The title speaks for itself. Kohn’s polemic against extrinsic motivators not only in the classroom, but also at home and in the workplace, is particularly relevant in this age of high-stakes testing.
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971.
A classic indictment of the “education as regurgitation” model, Postman and Weingartner’s book has compelled generations of teachers to deconstruct the “hidden curriculum” of factory education and subvert it through more humanistic pedagogy.
Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer, 1994.
This seminal work by Papert, the visionary M.I.T. professor evaluates America’s progress - or lack thereof - in tapping the transformational power of computers in its schools.
Will Richardson, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 2008.
Richardson explores the transformational potential of personal computers, the internet, and “web 2.0” in teaching and learning for the “connected 21st century.”
Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind, 1998.
Egan argues that the purpose of Western education is based on three contradictory ideas: that schools should socialize, teach conformity, and cultivate each student’s individuality. Egan posits instead a model based on matching pedagogy to a series of stages in developmental psychology. The emphasis on the role of imagination in student learning is particularly provocative of new directions in pedagogy.
A.S. Neill, Summerhill, 1960.
A classic of “permissive” education, Neill's book about Summerhill, a “self-governing free school,” is an undeniably “radical” vision of schooling that, if nothing else, is instructive in its contrast to the current discourse on education.
Photo: Bookshelf by chotda
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Clay Burell
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Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.
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Ah, I see I have more reading to do. The only one of these on my list was Summerhill, which seems to align with my own developing ideas about education (Sudbury Valley seems just about perfect). I suppose I should bone up on other ideas as well, of course, so all these are going to have to be read at some point.
Posted by SP Greenlaw on 01/03/2009 @ 08:53AM PT
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I agree with so many of the books on this list. Many are on my shelves, both at school and at home. I'd add "You Can't Say You Can't Play" by Vivian Gussin Paley. Although it is about the social lives of elementary school children, it also resonates in all content areas - especially when it is time to choose authors to read in class (in my upper school English class I think about what authors we don't play with all the time), seating in class, or group formation for cooperative learning. How and who we exclude is as important as who we include. A wise teacher once reminded me that it was important that socially excluded children not have to worry about where they sat in English class.
Posted by Kate Tabor on 01/03/2009 @ 10:11AM PT
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The list should include Dr. Ron Miller's books on holistic education
Posted by Marion Hubbard on 01/03/2009 @ 11:58AM PT
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Another must read for anyone interested in education is Frank Smith's "The Book of Learning and Forgetting" for an excellent explanation of how people learn as well as practical suggestions for improving our schools.
Posted by Joni Zander on 01/03/2009 @ 10:46PM PT
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@All: Keep the recs coming. I'm packing up tonight to fly out tomrrow morning for Bangkok, so I'll have to keep this short.
BUT:
@S.P., @Kate, it's great to see both of you here. Don't be strangers, please (though I'm not leaving BS either. A different hat.)
Posted by Clay Burell on 01/04/2009 @ 03:03AM PT
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Clay,
First, congrats on the gig here. Very cool!
I'd like to throw Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind" in to the mix.
Posted by Michael Walker on 01/04/2009 @ 05:27AM PT
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Robert Pirsig has some wonderful musings on education and "teaching Quality" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's a particular section where Phaedrus experiments with not giving out grades until the end of the semester that is quite provocative. Carl Rogers also wrote an essay on student-centered learning that featured many of the same themes.
For more practical advice, I find Teaching with Love and Logic to be indispensable.
Great work on this blog!
www.jcshakespeare.wordpress.com
Posted by JC Shakespeare on 01/04/2009 @ 07:53PM PT
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Montessori system of education has been most effective as a student-centered structure since the turn of last century. Unfortunately, since it was not adopted by the public education system, it was available only through the private domain. If we truly want outstanding and transformational results in education, it would behoove interested educationists to read as much Montessori as possible. One of her entire early books can be found online:http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/montessori/method/method.html
Posted by Nancy Williams on 01/06/2009 @ 10:29AM PT
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It would be nice to see books providing an anthropological/hermeneutical view of the public education movement in the US.
Along these lines, if you are interested in a quick (very informal - at least a place to begin) inform on Dewey's and Kilpatrick's influence on why Montessori was not selected as the public school model I recommend beginning at this link:http://www.edarticle.com/alternate-education/montessori/i-love-maria-montessori.html
Posted by Nancy Williams on 01/06/2009 @ 05:35PM PT
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While readings are great source to get information, I think the best way is to visit the schools. Generally (I am currently a high school senior at a relatively competitive school), schools are either too lenient and the teachers are unqualified OR (in my school's case) too hard that it discourage learning.
Currently, I am taking Differential Equation and other AP courses, and I have concluded that the teachers simply doesn't have the ability to teach. Rather, they teach us how to pass the test and memorize the steps/equations. This is not the way to encourage American innovations.
On the other side, certain schools (in poorer districts) are underfunded that they are unable to carry out their role to encourage education.
Personally, I think teachers should not have tenures (I know, old habits are hard to break), but there are many teachers simply unqualified (but have tenures). Instead, the teachers should have reexaminations every 5-10 years to assure that they still understand their subjects. In addition, schools should be better funded (well, obviously, but much harder said than done).
While social security, Iraq War, economics are all major problems today, we still need to understand that education is for the future. Without investment into education today, we will not succeed tomorrow. It may not be immediate danger, but it should be a major priority on the national agenda. Furthermore, education today is the long term solution to crisis(es) of tomorrow.
Posted by Ben Zheng on 01/07/2009 @ 02:59PM PT
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I'd recommend Brain Based Learning by Eric Jensen. http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Based-Learning-Science-Teaching-Training/dp/1890460052
Posted by Anthony Armstrong on 01/08/2009 @ 11:03PM PT
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I think you might want to add "The Underground History of Education in America" by John Taylor-Gatto to the list.
Posted by Charlotte Spears on 01/10/2009 @ 07:21AM PT
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John Taylor Gatto's books are a must for understanding the mess our school systems are in. If you lack the time, then by all means read his Six Lesson School Teacher.
As a retired high school art teacher, it is obvious to me that for the most part our school systems only develop the left (analytical) side of the brain. When students have the opportunity to be creative via music, visual arts, dance etc. they will remain in school. Going beyond that, I highly recommend the books of nature educator and musician Michael J. Cohen.
Posted by Beverley Tisdell on 03/28/2009 @ 07:58PM PT
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I would like to also suggest reading anything by John Taylor Gatto including Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling as well as School as a Journey by Torin Finzer which delightfully highlights Waldorf Education through the eyes of a Waldorf class teach.
Posted by Andrea Nandoskar on 01/10/2009 @ 02:48PM PT
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From this Change website, it appears that books are becoming obsolete. It would be nice to see summaries of the contents of the books posted so that people would be up-to-speed for the discussions that happen. It's rewarding to be exposed to many differing ideas fast.
Posted by tamsin mcewen on 02/15/2009 @ 08:28PM PT
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Clicking the titles takes you to more info, if that's what you mean.
Print is definitely declining, for better or worse. Newspapers falling like the trees they kill, almost daily now.
Posted by Clay Burell on 02/15/2009 @ 08:32PM PT
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