Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us

by Mike Rose

Overview

In the tradition of Jonathan Kozol, this little book is driven by big questions. What does it mean to be educated? What is intelligence? How should we think about intelligence, education, and opportunity in an open society? Why is a commitment to the public sphere central to the way we answer these questions?

Drawing on forty years of teaching and research, from primary school to adult education and workplace training, award-winning author Mike Rose reflects on these and other questions related to public schooling in America. He answers them in beautifully written chapters that are both rich in detail—a first-grader conducting a science experiment, a carpenter solving a problem on the fly, a college student’s encounter with a story by James Joyce—and informed by a deep and powerful understanding of history, the psychology of learning, and the politics of education.

Rose decries the narrow focus of educational policy in our time: the drumbeat of test scores and economic competition. Why School? will be embraced by parents and teachers alike, and readers everywhere will be captivated by Rose’s eloquent call for a bountiful democratic vision of the purpose of schooling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595585226
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/08/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	262 KB

About the Author

Mike Rose, a professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is the author of Lives on the Boundary, The Mind at Work, and Possible Lives. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Grawemeyer Award in Education, and the Commonwealth Club of California Award for Literary Excellence in Nonfiction. He lives in Santa Monica.

Read an Excerpt

PREFACE

WHY SCHOOL? comes from a professional lifetime
in classrooms, creating and running educational programs,
teaching and researching, writing and thinking
about education and human development. It offers a
series of appeals for big-hearted social policy and an
embrace of the ideals of democratic education—from
the way we define and structure opportunity to the way
we respond to a child adding a column of numbers.
Collectively, the chapters provide a bountiful vision of
human potential, illustrated through the schoolhouse,
the workplace, and the community.

We need such appeals, I think, because we have lost
our way.

We live in an anxious age and seek our grounding,
our assurances in ways that don’t satisfy our longing—
that, in fact, make things worse. We’ve lost hope in
the public sphere and grab at private solutions, which
undercut the sharing of obligation and risk and keep
us scrambling for individual advantage. We’ve narrowed
the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness,
our kids becoming economic indicators.
We’ve reduced our definition of human development
and achievement—that miraculous growth of intelligence,
sensibility, and the discovery of the world—to a
test score. Though we pride ourselves as a nation of
opportunity and a second chance, our social policies
can be terribly ungenerous. We rush to embrace the
new—in work, in goods, in the language we use to describe
our problems—yet long for tradition, for craft,
for the touch of earth, wood, another hand.

We do live in uncertain and unsettling times, but one
can imagine all sorts of responses, and we have been
taking—and have been led to take—those that are
fear–based, inhumane, less than noble. We yearn for
more and as a society deserve better. This yearning was
one of the forces that drove the election of Barack
Obama.

My hope is that the contents of this book in some
small way contribute to a reinvigorated discussion of
why we educate in America, maybe through a particular
story, maybe because of information I can provide
from my own teaching and research, maybe from a perspective
that provides a different way to see.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction: Why School? 1

1. In Search of a Fresh Language
of Schooling 25

2. Finding Our Way: The Experience
of Education 31

3. No Child Left Behind and the Spirit
of Democratic Education 43

4. Business Goes to School 53

5. Politics and Knowledge 65

6. Reflections on Intelligence in the
Workplace and the Schoolhouse 73

7. On Values, Work, and Opportunity 89

8. Standards, Teaching, Learning 97

9. Remediation at the University 117

10. Re-mediating Remediation 127

11. Soldiers in the Classroom 139

12. A Language of Hope 145

13. Finding the Public Good Through the
Details of Classroom Life 153

Conclusion: The Journey Back and Forward 161

Acknowledgments 171

Notes 173

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A beautifully written work . . . [a] moving call for a humane approach to education that accounts for the needs of every child."
—Christian Science Monitor

Editorial Reviews

"Once again at his most bold and brilliant…Rose is a rare treasure in this dreary moment of debate along the dismal flatlands of education discourse. He brings us to the mountaintops."
—Jonathan Kozol

"Rose gives a larger sense of the interplay between what happens in the classroom and the world outside school…[and] a capacious sense of what can happen within the interior world of the classroom."
—The New York Review of Books

"Rose puts into clear words what so many of us feel is lacking in our children's education…[He] recalibrates our thinking in this little book, the first step toward change."
—Los Angeles Times

"Wondrous."
—In These Times

"A compact and potent collection of essays."
—The Nation

Selected by Bill Moyers as a "must read" book of 2009 "I interviewed Mike Rose 20 years ago for my series A World of Ideas. He was already on the path to becoming one of our most exciting thinkers about education in the lives of marginalized people. He lives in the real world, and this new book–slim and vividly written–is an inspiration for how to cope with it in our classrooms."
—Bill Moyers

"This a beautifully written work…Mike Rose draws on over 40 years of teaching experience and research, weaving memoir and policy discussion together in this moving call for a humane approach to education that accounts for the needs of every child."
—Christian Science Monitor

"Rose invites parents, community members, and other stakeholders to join the conversation orbiting our educational system and reclaim it in the name of democracy and equity…Rose profiles remarkable teachers, engaged students, and blossoming schools. His descriptions of each are underlined by his convection that learning, as a human endeavor…is magnificent. It is wondrous."
—In These Times

"Aims to reinvigorate a discussion on the value of education in a democracy…strongly advocates for education that values reflection, curiosity, and imagination rather than the quantifiable measures favored by economics."
—Booklist

"One of the most insightful, challenging, honest, helpful, and encouraging books I've read in many years."
—Joe Nathan, Director, Center for School Change, University of Minnesota

From the Publisher