Ten Books on Education Worth Having

It goes without saying that the following list will suffer sins of omission, but it's the product of input from a large number of dedicated educators. Feel free to add your recommendations in the comment thread.

John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916.

The classic vision of progressive, democratic education by one of America’s greatest philosophers. (Online version here.)

Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, 1992.

The classic exposé of the two-tier education system producing America’s “achievement gap,” Kozol’s tour of schools in inner cities, and his method of often letting students and teachers speak for themselves, is powerful and sobering.

Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform, 2003.

Lipman’s book is required reading for two reasons: first, written eleven years after Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, its case study of neo-liberal education reform in Chicago Public Schools makes it a solid companion to Kozol’s book. Second, the book is particularly timely, insofar as the “Chief Executive Officer” of the Chicago school system was none other than Arne Duncan, tapped by Barack Obama to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. Readers of Lipman’s book are treated to an in-depth tour of Duncan’s reforms up to 2002: school closures, charter schools, military schools, and more. Fore-warned is fore-armed. (Preview it on Google Books.)

Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools that Work, 2001.

Experienced educator and Stanford professor Darling-Hammond, leader of Barack Obama’s educational transition team and favorite among progressives for Secretary of Education, lays out a comprehensive, research-based, student-centered vision of school reform - among the most forceful indictments of the NCLB, high-stakes testing,

education-as-business ideology. (Darling-Hammond’s essay for The Nation is a more condensed, but just as powerful, critique of NCLB.)

Paul Tough, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, 2008.

Tough’s book about a visionary community organizer’s campaign to improve Harlem schools from the grass-roots up serves, among other things, as an important reminder that governments and bureaucracies are not the only agents in school improvement. School communities - that means all of us - can commit to the cause in ambitious ways as well.

Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, As, Praise, and Other Bribes, 2001.

The title speaks for itself. Kohn’s polemic against extrinsic motivators not only in the classroom, but also at home and in the workplace, is particularly relevant in this age of high-stakes testing.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971.

A classic indictment of the “education as regurgitation” model, Postman and Weingartner’s book has compelled generations of teachers to deconstruct the “hidden curriculum” of factory education and subvert it through more humanistic pedagogy.

Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer, 1994.

This seminal work by Papert, the visionary M.I.T. professor evaluates America’s progress - or lack thereof - in tapping the transformational power of computers in its schools.

Will Richardson, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 2008.

Richardson explores the transformational potential of personal computers, the internet, and “web 2.0” in teaching and learning for the “connected 21st century.”

Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind, 1998.

Egan argues that the purpose of Western education is based on three contradictory ideas: that schools should socialize, teach conformity, and cultivate each student’s individuality. Egan posits instead a model based on matching pedagogy to a series of stages in developmental psychology. The emphasis on the role of imagination in student learning is particularly provocative of new directions in pedagogy.

A.S. Neill, Summerhill, 1960.

A classic of “permissive” education, Neill's book about Summerhill, a “self-governing free school,” is an undeniably “radical” vision of schooling that, if nothing else, is instructive in its contrast to the current discourse on education.

Photo: Bookshelf by chotda