I haven’t read Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality yet, but just saw this review article at ISI. The review is compelling – here are a few excerpts:
Our educational romantics assume that everyone is equally teachable, that every child would succeed at equal, developmentally correct speed, if only there were more money, better teachers, a more demanding curriculum, and the like. But Murray objects, and persuasively so, pithily citing the requisite scientific studies to prove it.
The opening proposition of this part of the argument is that “too many people are going to college,” and about this, Murray has two overarching and interrelated themes. First, most people don’t have to spend four years at a college to acquire the abilities that would prepare them for a job or profession. The run-of-the-mill B.A., moreover, is becoming a less precise and hence less useful signal to employers. But Murray’s more fundamental concern is that the vast numbers of students attending college who are not capable of doing real college work have diluted and distorted what should be a college’s true work, which is providing a truly higher education for those who can benefit from it.
Murray says, college today is not at all what it’s cracked up to be. In particular, it is overrated as a place to grow up. He describes what many of us know. Most students are able to get by with a light workload, Fridays and Saturdays are not taken seriously, faculty are often too accommodating to students, and grade inflation has undermined the transcript. Character is not only left undeveloped but is in fact positively harmed both by the campus social culture and by the naive relativism and non-judgmentalism of the intellectual atmosphere.
Note the solution is, not-surprisingly, a balance of academics, love, and wisdom in a family setting. Exactly the homeschooling paradigm, which Murray even mentions directly.
So how are these changes to occur?… Neither the educational bureaucrats in charge of K-12 education nor the major stakeholders in higher education can be counted on. In both areas, he seems to rely on a return to an educational realism rooted in love—a love of mothers and fathers for their children on the one hand and a love of virtue and wisdom by larger souls on the other— to, little by little, take responsibility for education out of the hyper-democratically beaten path. For example, he counts on the expanding homeschooling movement to evolve into a universe of alternative schools.
So keep it up Mom and Dad – you’re doing great work!
See more comments on Real Education at Amazon.com.