Ask David Steiner why he wrote his latest book, A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools, and he will get right to the point.
First, he says, education has lost its way. There has been a fundamental turning away from the academic core and a pursuit of proxies such as metacognitive skills for which there is weak research support. Second, what we offer is too often “mind-numbingly dull… students are just deeply bored.”
Third, the education system is fragmented. “If you wanted to design an education system for failure, what we’ve got is pretty close,” he says. There are parallel professional universes in the field—those of test design, curriculum design, and teacher preparation programs—that rarely speak to each other.
Last, he says, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that things are improving. GPAs and graduation rates have soared, but real academic results have not. “Dead flat,” Steiner says. “Instead, we now label as a success what we used to call failure.”
