Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us

Description

Drawing on forty years of teaching and research, from primary school to adult education and workplace training, award-winning author Mike Rose reflects on 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.

Mike Rose, a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is the author of numerous books, including The Mind at Work, Possible Lives, and Back to School (The New Press). 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.

"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... 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