Why Schools Fail: The Denial of Individuality and the Decline of Learning

WHY SCHOOLS FAIL is a great view of the progression of the American education system from its very beginnings to the present day. Goldberg traces teaching methods that are used today back to their origin, often showing how they weren't any more effective then than they are today. This is not a cry back to some mythical Golden Age of Education, but rather an insistence on using the knowledge that we have of child psychology and modern methods of teaching, and creating something better.The author goes into great detail explaining the effects that some of these practices have upon children. A child may get through all four years of High School math with passing grades, but if the experience has been an unpleasant one, he or she is unlikely to develop a lifelong passion for it. A student will come to see mathematics (for example) as something to be feared or avoided and will not likely be continuing his or her education past what is absolutely required. Goldberg feels that this turns too many people away from knowledge, as they come to associate it with all the unpleasant things that they remember from their school days.Goldberg questions the rigid structure present in the current educational system. He claims that this stifles creativity and individuality. Many of the anecdotes fall into the funny-because-true category (such as the stories of students forced to hold paper in their mouths to prevent their lips from moving while reading). Not all of his criticisms are new to those who fault the public education system, but where others merely note the practices they disagree with, Goldberg goes into a lot more detail and questions why methods that have been shown to fail repeatedly over time are still being used. Instead of just mentioning that they fail, a lot of time is spent showing how they fail, why they fail and how long they've been failing for.I recommend this book to anyone interested in furthering one's knowledge of the educational system. There should be quite enough here for both a casual reader and someone looking for detail. The book did not receive a full five star rating from me because I did not agree with much of the final chapter in which Goldberg says what he thinks needs to be done in order to fix the current system. I found it to be too much like a voucher system and that would create more problems than it would solve. However, not a lot of time was spent discussing this and one should not take from this review the idea that this book is about how to overhaul the system. This book is primarily about what the failures are and it does an excellent job of pointing them out.