Recently, Tom Newkirk joined Alfie Kohn to talk about Kohn’s new book, Schooling Beyond Measure and Other Unorthodox Essays About Education. In today’s clip, they discuss the currently presented narrative of American education and how these stories influence our perception of teachers and schools.
Kohn addresses three of these stories that he finds particularly disturbing:
- Everything can be and should be reduced to numbers
- People in schools don’t have high standards and need to be controlled from above
- Success driven by global economic competitiveness requires beating other people and seeing them as obstacles
Watch the clip below:
Kohn’s new book, Schooling Beyond Measure, is a collection of provocative and insightful essays that address big-picture policy issues as well as small scale classroom interactions. In it, he looks carefully at research about such topics as homework, play, the supposed benefits of practice, parent involvement in education, the alleged inferiority of U.S. schools relative to those in other countries, and summer learning loss—discovering in each case that what we've been led to believe doesn't always match what the studies actually say.
Click here to learn more about Schooling Beyond Measure and to read a sample from the book. Follow Alfie Kohn on Twitter @alfiekohn or visit his web site at AlfieKohn.org.
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Alfie Kohn has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.” The author of over a dozen books, he has helped shape the thinking of educators and parents for over two decades. Kohn has been featured on hundreds of TV and radio programs, including the “Today” show and “Oprah”; he has been profiled in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, while his work has been described and debated in many other leading publications.
