Author Archive

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz uses abundant qualitative research along with his own experience to paint a picture of a dysfunctional system and offer suggestions for how to fix it. There is serious advice for students and parents so they can avoid the traps the system offers. The system does a disservice to elite students who are almost uniformly wealthy as it screens out children from lower classes. While the rich have always had educational advantages, the disparity is worse than ever. Click the icon at the bottom of any page to purchase this thought provoking book for yourself and any policy makers, parents, and students you know.

William Deresiewicz

• William was a professor at Yale until 2008. He is the author of the landmark essays The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, and Solitude and Leadership, and the book A Jane Austin Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. He is a frequent speaker on campuses around the country, a contributing writer for The Nation, and a contributing editor for The New Republic and The American Scholar.

Introduction

• William believes that our elite universities have produced students who are smart, talented, and driven, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose. They are trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they do, but with no idea why they are doing it. His real critique in the book is aimed at the adults who’ve made them who they are. He also aims to help students rescue themselves from the system. Even though it’s aimed a college students, there are good lessons here for high school students, their parents, and educators everywhere.

1. The Students

• The students in this book appear to be the winners of the race that adults have made of childhood. While they appear healthy, beneath the surface we often find toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression. Surveys indicate that emotional well-being has fallen to its lowest level in the 25-year history of the study with half reporting feelings of hopelessness, and a third saying that depression has made it difficult to function. There is also an increase in the use of antidepressants, antianxietals, and stimulants like Adderall.
• Starting in grade school they are constantly jumping through hoops that include school work, athletics, music, and other activities that leaves them no time and no tools to figure out what they want out of life. Once they get into a selective school, they often have no idea why they are there. They have learned how to be a student, but not how to use their minds. Most are good at coloring inside the lines with little or no passion about ideas. There life is all about the accumulation of gold starts, and they can’t imagine doing something that can’t be put on a resume. Rather than learning as much as possible, they seek to do as little as possible as long as they get A’s. Most students dress, look, and act the same so what passes for diversity looks more like 32 flavors of vanilla. The selection process produces students who have only experienced success, but this hides the fact they live with a constant fear of failure. They are risk adverse and are increasingly seeking fewer and fewer different majors.

Share this:

Learn academic writing with AcademicHelp.net. See a lot of free writing guides and samples.

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens by Benedict Carey summarizes research on this topic, much of which educators have yet to implement. Education’s leaders need to read this book and work to reform the system accordingly. Click the icon at the bottom of any page to get a copy for educators you know.

Benedict Carey

• Benedict is an award-winning science reporter who has been at The New York Times since 2004. He is one of the newspaper’s most emailed reporters. He has a bachelor’s degree in math from the University of Colorado, and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He has written about health and science for twenty-five years and lives in New York City.

Introduction

• Benedict starts with his own story about how he got mostly A’s in school along with low SAT scores and couldn’t get in to any of his desired colleges. Along the way he discovered many of the techniques he covers in this book that allowed him to integrate the exotica of new subjects into daily life, in a way that makes them seep under his skin. He has mined the latest science to so how you can make learning part of living and less about isolated choice during his writing career.

1. The Biology of Memory

• Benedict starts with a simplified explanation of how the brain is structured. Thanks to the study of brain injured patients, science has developed some understanding of how the brain stores and retrieves memories. At the bottom center of the brain is the hippocampus, which is vital for the formation of memories. One type of memory called episodic is used to remember events that take place over time like the first day of high school. The other type is semantic, which deals with facts rather than experiences. When we retrieve a memory of an event, we need to reconstruct it. As a result, the story is likely to change over time as one doesn’t put the story together the same way each time. The basic plot, however, should not change much if at all. In essence, using our memory changes our memory.
• We have another kind of memory that remembers physical skills. This is called motor learning and is not dependent on the hippocampus. We also have conscious and subconscious systems and a lot goes on while we are at sleep. Thanks to surgery on patients with split brains, we know that the left side is the wordsmith while the right side is the visual expert. The left brain interprets what we experience and makes stories that we use to remember what happened. We have at least thousands of brain modules that perform skills like calculating changes in light, tone of voice, and changes in facial expression, and they all run at the same time.

Share this:

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World by Young Zhao offers and insider’s account of the Chinese school system, revealing the secrets that make it both the best and the worst. Yong was born in China and taught there. He has also maintained contact in order to tell us how China produces top scores on international tests but falls short when it comes to innovation and creativity. There are big lessons here for US policy makers. Click below to purchase this outstanding book that should be of interest to students, parents, and educators alike.

Yong Zhao

• Yong holds the first presidential chair at the University of Oregon, where he serves as associate dean for global education, and professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. He has been featured in media ranging from The New York Times and USA Today to NPR and ABC. He is the author of more than 100 articles and 20 books. Check out his website and follow him on Twitter @YougZhaoUO.

Introduction – Fatal Attraction: America’s Suicidal Quest for Educational Excellence

• The virus threatening America’s schools is the rising tide of authoritarianism. Most Americans have failed to recognize that government mandated tests are a Trojan horse containing the ghost of authoritarianism as they attempt to instill in all students the same knowledge and skills deemed valuable by the authority. All one need do is look to China to see the full range of tragic events that can happen under authoritarian rule. China indeed has produced superior test takers, but has failed to cultivate talents and creativity.
• The damage being done takes instructional time away for testing, demoralizes teachers, and narrows educational experiences. Lost is a creative culture that celebrates diversity and respects individuality. School boards have surrendered to state and federal governments, and now in effect, only collect local taxes. Instead of learning from China’s miseries, we seen to be on the road to duplicate them. Do we want a system like China where only 10% of college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses because the students lack the qualities our new society needs?

Share this:

Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa is a follow up to their landmark Academically Adrift that made the case for how many college students end up learning very little, end up unemployed or under employed, and living at home. Now they follow this same college cohort two years after graduation and see that many found a difficult transition to adulthood. Together these works should challenge students and colleges to rethink the aims, approaches, and achievements of higher education. Click here to read my summary of Academically Adrift.

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

• Richard is a professor in the Department of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. He is a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools. Josipa Roksa is associate professor of sociology and education and associate director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the University of Virginia.

1. The Study

• This book is based on research that tracks more than 1,600 students (emerging adults) through their senior year at twenty-five diverse four-year colleges and universities, and approximately 1,000 college graduates from this sample for two years following their graduation in 2009. They also did in-depth interviews with a subset of 80 graduates in 2011 in order to find how post-college outcomes were associated with collegiate experiences and academic performance. Like their previous study, they used the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to measure critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication around the time of their graduation.

Share this: