What Is Wrong With Our Schools? The ideology impoverishing education in America and how we can do better for our students
“What is wrong with our schools?” is the question everyone seems to be asking, or more like screaming nowadays. Standard answers point to everything from school funding to unions to bureaucracies and more. In this book, Daniel Buck provides a different answer: flawed ideas – ideas about instruction, curriculum, even human nature itself – are the root cause of American schooling’s dysfunction.
Touching on philosophy, contemporary educational studies, cognitive science, and his own experience in the classroom, Buck argues that so long as we build our system on incorrect first principles, all other reforms are for naught. In place of the progressive education that pervades our schools, Buck argues for a traditionalist approach – classic literature, direct instruction, sequenced curricula, clear rules and consequences – as the education we need for the future.
Touching on philosophy, contemporary educational studies, cognitive science, and his own experience in the classroom, Buck argues that so long as we build our system on incorrect first principles, all other reforms are for naught. In place of the progressive education that pervades our schools, Buck argues for a traditionalist approach – classic literature, direct instruction, sequenced curricula, clear rules and consequences – as the education we need for the future.
Newsletter Signup
By clicking ‘Sign Up,’ I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Hachette Book Group’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use
Reviews
Daniel Buck's book opens with a disquieting anecdote. He had read aloud with students from a shared novel, enriched the book with background knowledge, and led a whole-class discussion but Buck's students had never experienced anything like it. That such traditional methods were utterly foreign to his students, whose only experience was in schools informed by romantic and "progressive" theories of education, is the starting point to a book full of observations and reflections that are carefully researched, insightful, and grounded in student welfare. Unbeknownst to his students, Buck's "new" way of teaching drew on traditional concepts of instruction informed by research into cognitive and social science. This is a profoundly thoughtful and important book.
I have followed Daniel Buck's work for years. He is emerging as an indispensable and engaging voice on education. If he writes with more authority than most, it's because his views were formed not in an ivory tower, but as a classroom teacher who takes seriously his responsibility to other people's children. What is Wrong With Our Schools? will bring his insights to the broader audience he richly deserves.
There's plenty in this smart, hard-hitting book to make anyone feel pessimistic about the state of American education. But optimism is still in order, because Buck has picked up the mantle of traditionalism for a new generation.