The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education

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.)