The United States is known as a world leader in innovation, boasting brilliant thinkers and trendsetting companies, but that status is at grave risk. American children are well outside the top-ten international student rankings in reading, science, and math; those rankings--not to mention the nation's position of leadership on everything from the economy to the military to issues of moral authority--will continue to plummet unless we take dramatic...

John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction, now available in paperback, focuses on mechanisms of traditional education that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a byproduct of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, introduced the now-famous expression of the title into the common vernacular. Weapons of Mass Instruction adds another chilling metaphor to the brief against...

"Liberal education, if it does not discover how to speak to society in ways our culture understands, and if it cannot make its virtues apparent to the democracy in which we live, will make itself smaller and smaller, lose the audience it wishes to hold, and die by diminishment. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. They don't get why anyone would study literature or history or the classics-or, more contemporarily,...

"In order to move toward a more egalitarian society, the American education system must be reformed to account for genetic differences between individual academic abilities. All groups, all races, and all genders are created equal. Not all individuals are. The Cult of Smart is a provocative and groundbreaking discussion of human potential, a topic which, in recent times, has been corrupted by the pernicious and cynical pseudoscience of "race realism."...

"Education has become synonymous with schooling, but it doesn't have to be. As schooling becomes increasingly standardized and test driven, occupying more of childhood than ever before, parents and educators are questioning the role of schooling in society. Many are now exploring and creating alternatives. In a compelling narrative that introduces historical and contemporary research on self-directed education, Unschooled also spotlights how a diverse...

"In an entirely fresh take on school reform, business journalist and bestselling author Andrea Gabor argues that Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other leaders of the prevailing education-reform movement have borrowed all the wrong lessons from the business world. After the Education Wars explains how the market-based measures and carrot-and-stick incentives informing today's reforms are out of sync with the nurturing culture that good schools foster and--contrary...

"The prize-winning PBS correspondent's provocative antidote to America's misguided approaches to K-12 school reform During his four-decade career at NPR and PBS, John Merrow reported from every state in the union, as well as from dozens of countries, on topics including America's obsession with standardized testing, the low standards of many teacher-training institutions, how corporate greed created an epidemic of attention deficit disorder, and Michelle...

What is the purpose of education? What kind of people do we want our children to grow up to be? How can we design schools so that students will acquire the skills they ll need to live fulfilled and productive lives? These are just a few of the questions that renowned educator Dennis Littky explores in The Big Picture: Education is Everyone's Business, the culmination of more than 30 years of rethinking education and inspiring others to commit their...

"We're Doing It Wrong is a thought-provoking dissection of the issues plaguing American public schools. Each chapter identifies a major problem in the education system, exploring its roots and repercussions. A teacher himself, Slater opens up and gives readers an insider's perspective on topics that have been at the center of ongoing debates as well as recent hot button issues, such as: standardized testing, teacher evaluation practices, helicopter...

From the bestselling author of Cultural Literacy, a passionate and cogent argument for reforming the way we teach our children. Why, after decades of commissions, reforms, and efforts at innovation, do our schools continue to disappoint us? In this comprehensive book, educational theorist E. D. Hirsch, Jr. masterfully analyzes how American ideas about education have veered off course, what we must do to right them, and most importantly why. He argues...