Disgraceful indeed.


Not a bad book for what it was designed to cover.   January 16, 2002
 34 out of 40 found this review helpful

That a book entitled School : The Story of American Public Education is not all things to all people is not surprising. The book is limited in scope to a history of public education in the United States. It says so in the title. It is not a book on home schooling, private schools, schools outside the U.S., a history of people who disagree profoundly with the American Public School System or a broad study of educational methods. The title pretty much sums this up.

This book has several strong points:

1) It's written is a succinct prose style. This isn't necessarily a boon to education majors, but it's a good thing for the general public. It's hard to make education sound interesting, and this book does a pretty good job. As a special sidelight, this book will interest thinking people inside the school system. It may even be picked up by teenagers, those currently most ensconced in the U.S. system of public education.

2) It is one of the only books available to non-professionals. It's fairly easy to get information, dates, a rundown of the major players in educational theory/movements, and an idea about what those involved in the educational system thought about their schools at the time. It isn't one stop shopping, but it is a good start.

3)The accompanying photographs are marvelous. Nothing illustrates the crowding of the tenement schools, he desperate situation of child laborers in the early part of the 20th century, or the inclusion protests of the 1960's and 1970's quite like the pictures.

4) It is possible to read between the lines. Although the book doesn't explicitly link ideas like the push from German Immigrants to get their children out of the "shop" track and into college prep. and the current debates about bilingual education, a reasonable person is able to gather enough information to make that leap given the information in this book.

The books limits include:

1)Pollyanna does live here. The underlying message is that the public school system is a miraculous thing, and that if left alone will be able to solve any crisis it encounters. There isn't any criticism of this idea, but "a critical history" never appears in the write up.

2)Nobody wants to win one for the Gipper. After 1980 the book is biased against the "bottom line, business oriented" approach heralded in with "A Nation at Risk." This is where I was most disappointed in this book. I'm not looking for that kind of bias in my reference books, and it is undeniably there.

Final analysis:

Buy this book for your middle school and high school library. Let your home schooler read it with other texts. Do not base your Ph.D. in educational theory on this text. Try to use it with other articles critical of public education or positive about home schooling, charter schools, or vouchers. And, as always, please think about what you read.


All History Is Relative   December 5, 2001
 4 out of 19 found this review helpful

Any book that is able to stir up the emotional muck present in the heads of others (...) ... must have something going for it!

Personally, I didn't read the book. I did watch the entire series aired on Public Television. I also attempted to purchase that video series, but those tapes are not available (...). At least, not as of 12/01.

I found the series very interesting, well balanced and documented. Yes, had a different group of folks put something together on this topic ... the presentation and content would have differed. Thus is the nature of any historical presentation, especially when it does not involve first-hand observation and experience. Lacking that, researchers are limited to their interpretations of the available evidence. I did not detect a significant bias in the presentation of any of the material (but then I do not consider myself to be an expert in the subject either!).

While the book may be a mirror image companion to the TV presentation, such is the nature of many of the current TV documentary/book combos. I don't have a problem with that, and I don't have an emotional axe to grind concerning this subject.

I completely enjoyed the video series and would purchase the book ... if I really believed I would ever have the time to read it (...) ;-)


A Disgraceful Book   September 23, 2001
 47 out of 67 found this review helpful

Let me say a few unkind words about School: The Story of American Public Education, the companion volume to the four part PBS television series being proclaimed by luminaries such as Ted Sizer as a "wonderful and timely book...on how and why Americans constructed the schools with wich we live today." (back cover blurb).

Where shall I begin? This expensive production on coated paper is neither the story of American public education in any but a mythological sense, nor even a competent consideration of the questions which continue to surround the institution of mass compulsion which assembles children by the police power of the state for centralized indoctrination. Instead it is, from start to finish, a shameless piece of propaganda, advancing the romantic notion that in spite of its shortcomings, school is truely a progressive miracle, growing better and better in spite of mean-spirited critics. This is a celebration of what is.

If potential readers could examine the list of funding sources for the documentary series at the back of the book, they would be able to anticipate the entire "argument" and save themselves thirty bucks. The Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Stanford University, the list of villains who visited this form of mutilation on the young is well-represented among the building-blocks of this project. But absent some prior understanding of the school institution and its creators/maintainers, it's probably a good idea to specify a few of the shortcomings.

Nowhere is any attempt made to seperate the terms "schooling" from "education." Throughout the ideas are conflated, as if to say "school" is to imply "education." Unsophisticated readers (and viewers) thus are led to build their understanding on sand, and to allow the writers to neatly sidestep the fact that SCHOOL as we have it descended to us from Prussian Germany and from the British conquest of Hindu India. In both places it was plain and simple, a tool for mass indoctrination of the young in the interests of, shall we say, "management." Indeed, the entire connection of ideas of the Prussian state to our form of schooling, both rigorous versions and progressive versions, (thus creating a Hegelian dialectic) is concealed.

William Wirt, the front man for the Rockefeller Foundation's introduction of dumbed-down schools to America just prior to WWI, is presented as an innocent do-gooder professional, riding the hobby horse of a good idea introduced before its time in Gary, Indiana. That Gary was the company town of the U.S. Steel Corporation, a totally artificial creation, is neatly overlooked. And that Wirt provoked a national scandal in the early 1930's by "confessing" before a Congressional hearing that he had been part of a conspiracy to overthrough American sovereignty is also left out.

The homeschooling revolution, which currently occupies about 2 million kids and grows by leaps and bounds regularly in both its secular and religious manifestations occupies about 30 seconds in this travesty of scholarship, even though it presents a hideous danger to the very existence of ill-named public schooling.

I could go on but the point is made. Although rich in commentary by many familiar big names who speak often in the public arena about school policy, the level of ignorance evinced by one and all is horrifying--perhaps indifference to the truth would be an equally relevant judgement.

No one who speaks favorably about schooling in this book is not a person who also draws an easy, comfortable living from its existence, its existence pretty much as it is. Even honorable people like David Tyack lend their names to this tapestry of flummoxing.

I've said enough. This is a disgraceful book, made more disgraceful by its pretty packaging, its use of a Hollywood star to sugar coat the pill, and its guaranteed infiltration into every school library in America.


Whistling Past the Graveyard   September 6, 2001
 17 out of 26 found this review helpful

Let's ignore the fact that this 200+ page book (with a publisher's price of $30) is little more than a transcript of the PBS series --

What bothers me most is that this diatribe seems determined to "whistle past the graveyard" of problems in American public education by insisting that public schools are doing everything Thomas Jefferson ever wanted them to do and that the real problem are "those people" who want to see change and more effective schools.

To listen to them, standards are bad, testing is driving people nuts, the idea that parents should have choices about where their children go to school is dangerous, and charters are nothing more than efforts by businesses to make money (nevermind that most charters are non-profits).

I looked extensively at the latter portion of the book -- the one dealing with modern day reforms and found it fascinating that the authors can't seem to find any problem with flat SAT scores, decreased student achievement and a lack of school accountability -- or at least they can't find a problem that can't be solved by money.

The reality: poor kids are doing worse than ever because the public schools have no incentive to pay attention to them or their parents, and the only way to solve that problem with money is by using it to let parents have choices. As it stands now, the public education system is a monopoly Bill Gates could only dream of in his wildest dreams.

Readers deserve better than a biased screed that seems to "circle the wagons" and attack anything remotely suggesting change.