The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up

People reading this review of Kieran Egan’s book The Future of Education: Reimagining Our Schools from the Ground Up will be old enough and experienced enough with the ways of American public schooling to have some opinion about the state of our schools— about the problems they face and what they do well or poorly. At the end of Egan’s provocative book, by way of a history of education he imagines being written about public schools in the first half of the 21 st century, Egan offers the following general description of schooling from the midnineteenth century until now. Do you think this description rings true? ...and the massive enterprise of schooling from mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century seems now just another of history’s cruel jokes on our human forebears. All that boredom and pain, that half-learned and barely understood knowledge, which engaged the imaginations of the tiniest minority of people, the ill-directed energy of teachers, and the resentment of so many students. After more than a decade of their lives spent in these schools, most students could recall pitifully little of what they had been taught and had read; they knew by heart nothing more than the clichéd words of some pop song. The wonder of the world around them, the passion of their history, the possibilities of human experience were things of which they glimpsed only the most fleeting sense. After they left school most students never read anything but mental pablum again. Schooling during this time seems to have been a massive and clumsy industry poorly designed to carry the experience of life and the accumulation of technological skills across the generations. (p. 180)