The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education

by Theodore R. Sizer

Overview

This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth.
Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines—guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child’s educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300128512
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Theodore R. Sizer is the founder and chairman emeritus of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of schools and centers engaged in restructuring and redesigning schools. University Professor Emeritus at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University and Brandeis University, he is the author of many books, including Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.

Table of Contents

	Preface: The Red Pencil	ix
1.	Building	1
2.	Authority	31
3.	Order	55
4.	Horace Compromised	91
	Epilogue: Dodging Our Duty	111
	Acknowledgments	121
	Notes	125

Editorial Reviews

After nearly five decades spent pondering American secondary schools, veteran educator Sizer finds that little has changed since he was a student. There is "great strength in tradition," he says, but the teaching methods employed in 1946, when he sat quaking in first-year Latin, are ineffective, and to this day students' future success is determined primarily by their social class not their school achievements. Sizer's frustration with American education is palpable in this slim book, which carefully considers the three "silences" of education and proposes ways to combat them. Dialogue between school administrators and their interrogators (like Sizer) breaks down, he says, over the difference between teaching and learning, the matter of authority, and the structure and order of the educational system itself. Sizer (Horace's Compromise), who has been a principal, school designer, teacher trainer and professor, proposes education that honors students' differences (antithetical to techniques currently employed by many teachers) and allows for individual attention (almost impossible in large public school classes). He applauds philosophies that "stress the importance of free minds [and] individual responsibility and creativity." The book is pleasantly free of weighty pedagogical terminology, and while both Sizer's problems and solutions will likely be familiar to concerned educators, his lucid arguments and his own experiences as a major figure in educational reform make this an enlightening book. Agent, Betsy Lerner. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Sizer here reflects upon his 50 years in education as a professor at Brown, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and headmaster of Phillips Academy. Though he recapitulates themes implicit in his earlier books (The Students Are Watching), he is more pointed in his discussion of our national inability to distinguish teaching from learning. He also insists that formal schooling must adapt to, as well as confront, the many strong influences found outside the classroom. Sizer follows a well-trodden path by concluding that educational policy must result from a confluence of family, school, and government interests. Like the many reform-minded educators before him, he provides alternatives and suggests arrangements beyond the school building that would design each child's educational program around his or her particular needs and potential. A readable and poignant summing up by one of America's noted educators; suitable for all public and academic collections that maintain holdings in education.-Ari Sigal, Catawba Valley Community Coll. Lib., Hickory, NC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"A forceful, hard-hitting, and sensibly-directed critique of American schooling, one that also sets forth a convincing plan for reform that policy-makers, parents, and general readers need to consider."—Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe

From the Publisher