Rating: WARTY!
Nikhil Goyal WAS a 17-year-old senior at Syosset High School when he first began haranguing the world about poor schooling, but after reading his book on school reformation, I was left with the feeling that his education was lacking - at least in terms of making intelligent constructive arguments and supporting them with solid data. I found this book (of which I read an advance review copy) to be shallow and inutile, and I cannot recommend it.
The system is culpable. However, what happens in nearly every instance is that instead of castigating the perpetrator of this crime, we - society - chide the victims. We blame the students for "refusing to be educated." We blame the millions of dropouts. We blame the misfits who weren't able to or refused to conform to the standards of conventional schooling. We blame the kids who goof off during class, the kids who don't shut up and sit down, the kids who don't pay attention, the kids who don't study enough, the kids who don't perform well on tests, the kids who don't finish their homework, and the kids who cut class or school altogether.Like many of his assertions, this author fails to back up his frequent wild claims evidence or references. Maybe it's all true, but I'm certainly not going to take the unsupported word of a stranger for this. Why should I believe it from a book any more than I would had some random traveler pinned my ear back with these claims on the subway? And I don't believe it is true. Yes, some children are blamed, as are some teachers and some schools, and even some cities or states, but to put this out there, as though everyone blames the children and only the children and no one is trying to do anything about it, is misleading at best, and downright dishonest at worst.
School drop-out rate has been declining recently and graduation rates are at an historic high. A USA Today report indicates the drop-out rate is only half a million, not a million or more. That's obviously still unacceptable, but misrepresenting it isn't helping.
We're told that over a million students drop out of school each year! This would mean that means that our drop-out rate is around fifty percent, which isn't even remotely true when graduation rates, which have been increasing over the last few years, are in the 80% range. Even that rate is far too low, and lower than other nations, but it certainly doesn't support a claim of a million a year. We don't even get to hear what the reason for the drop out is, so while a portion of it is undoubtedly because the student isn't happy at - or simply doesn't like - the school, to pretend the whole one million, even if it were not an exaggeration, is for this sole reason is dishonest.
This book is one anecdote after another, and none of these anecdotes are supported with references, yet they are substituted for data in making claims for how bad students supposedly think schools are - and the anecdotes in the beginning of the book came from 1909. HOW IS THAT EVEN REMOTELY RELEVANT?! We're told of a 2003 study which essentially tested whether kids were happier playing or going to school - well duhh! Why wasn't the result a surprise? If you conducted the same study on adults who are working, the result would undoubtedly be the same. Does this mean that all work environments are terrorist institutions at heart and we should reform them en masse? We're told, in another bold claim, that "Much of the hell children go through in school would not be tolerated by any adult," yet we have twenty million college students in the US. Hm! It seems "the hell" - whatever the undefined "hell" is - is widely tolerated by adults.
In an interview, the author has said, "One common irritant was all the testing." He also says that students should "not be broken up by age group. Instead, students should be grouped by ability." - but how do you gauge the ability without some form of testing? Crickets chirp. Claim after claim about what he thinks we should do, but not a single suggestion as to exactly what we should do or how we should do it and finance it. The author asserts, "We need to have school resemble the real world as much as possible." Why? No word. How would that work? No word. What improvement would it bring? No word. How do you gauge where a student is without some sort of measurement or testing? No word. And if this is what he wants, why advocate getting rid of advanced placement programs?
In an article, we read of him comparing public school curriculum with that of a school in San Franciso called "Brightworks", but what he doesn't say is that this school is not a public school - it does not have to accept all-comers. There is an admissions process and an admission fee. They can afford to select the brightest students with the best social skills and aptitude - the ones who will fit and work in their system. You cannot make a comparison between a very selective school like this and a regular public school! It's nonsensical and meaningless The author sadly and blindly seems to have narrowly-focused his views on his own personal school experience and derived all of his "ideas" - which are not novel - from that. He appears to have done a very limited survey of educators, but not of schools, so he doesn't appear to know about what schools are doing outside of his own tunnel vision.
Like too many Americans, the author harks back to a golden time of colonialism, when he appears to be claiming, without a shred of evidence to support the claim, that the colonials were very well-educated without any formalized schooling system. He conveniently forgets that the colonists were not your everyday people, but were actually "gentlemen" fortune hunters come to exploit the colonies for whatever they could get out of it. Even later in the time of Benjamin Franklin and Alexis de Tocqueville, the population was very largely rural and did not have to handle anything like we do today. The farms of today would be essentially unintelligible to the gentlemen of Franklin's era. But it serves the author's thesis well to compare the education "system" from those 'golden days' with the one today, whilst failing to compare the complexity of life and the employment skills needed today, because to do an honest comparison would fail him miserably. It serves him well to recall simpler times and say it will all work out in the end, without having to show how such a loose - and better-financed (these were wealthy men he's quoting and referencing) education system "beats" ours.
He asserts at one point that "school environments discourage the fostering of deep relationships and a larger sense of belonging" - so schools don't have sports teams, or clubs, or school 'houses'? No schools have uniforms? What school did he go to again? He says, " Out of the thirteen years most of us spend in school, we can usually only recount a handful of teachers we were genuinely attached." I can't recall one. How is this relevant again? And to what is it relevant? Is that crickets I hear again?
The author brings in a character named Sam, and goes on and on about him. It's a personal story and a good emotional trigger, but it's an anecdote, not data. There's no reason to believe that what Sam went through is "so common", or the norm, or representative. At one point we read:
Then finally, after two years of round-the-clock bullying [round the clock bullying at school? Was Sam in a boarding school?!], Sam's time in school improved slightly in the eighth grade. He grew taller. He gained some respect, made a few friends, received support from teachers, and didn't get ridiculed nearly as much as before.And all of this was without a radical reform to the school system! How on Earth is this even possible?! The author conveniently doesn't go into any details about what changed and how it changed, so that others can learn from this experience and build on it, because none of that would support his thesis that only a radical makeover will work. On the contrary, this actually argues instead that the present system can work if it's handled properly.
Sam's idea for reforming the system is to let him sleep in:
That's another quibble Sam has about school: the sleep schedule it forces him to conform to. "School starts around 8 a.m.," he said. "I have to wake up at 7 a.m. It's actually really tough. You feel unmotivated, sleepy. Your eyes are weary. It feels terrible." In another conversation, he told me, "My natural sleep [bedtime] schedule is around 12 p.m. to 1 a.m.Get thee to bed early, Sam! Duhh! You can't be up watching TV, or playing video games, or reading comic books, or whatever, until midnight and then expect to be awake the next morning. I have no idea what he means by his natural cycle being 12pm (that's twelve noon) to an hour after midnight! That would mean he's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed well before school starts. He should be at his peak at 7am if he wakes up at one! Did he mean 12am to 1pm? He wants to go to school in the afternoon and evening?! That's called night class.
He says, "In order to be popular, you need some combination of good looks, athletic ability, and brand-name apparel. Students who don't measure up or conform are inevitably ostracized." Welcome to the real world - the one you want schools to be more like! LOL! But once again. his unsupported claim is flawed. It's based on the assumption that bullying is violent, cruel, rife, and all-pervasive, yet he hasn't even attempted to make that argument! As with his entire thesis, he's started from assumptions and built his assertions on those without actually checking to even see if they're true, let alone if they're important. He asks, for example, "Why is bullying so common in traditional schools?" This a classic question along the well-worn lines of "Have you stopped beating you wife?" It's a question which carries on its back the assumption that bullying is very common in public schools, and the author takes this assertion and runs with it, without even once attempting to establish that what he claims is actually true. There's a huge difference between bullying existing in schools at some level, and it being "so common".
He then goes on, "Up to roughly 94 percent of a school's population consists of students, with the rest teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, and staff. So what you have is 6 percent of the population making decisions on behalf of the 94 percent without their consent. If that's not considered antidemocratic, I'm not sure what would be." This is a quote in a section about how bullying begins. All he's done here is make it look like that 6% are the bullies! Is he was trying to argue that all school bullying is done by teachers? I'd agree if he was talking about my school, but I'm smarter than to let myself be deluded that my experience can be extrapolated to the entire nation and what would maybe have worked there will apply to everyone else. If he's not arguing that teachers are the bullies, then how is his out-of-left-field statistic even remotely relevant to one kid bullying another kid?
His "solution" to school bullying? We must teach children to be kinder to one another! I can't believe no one ever thought of that before. Thank god for this author! All these years the evil system has been fomenting bullying by evidently teaching kids to be meaner to one another when the answer was right in front of us from the start! How could we all have been so incorrigibly blind?! Well, I guess it's not just we readers! Illiteracy in the US in 1870 was 20%. Now it’s almost zero. Besides, literature and conversation was pretty much all they had for home entertainment – so what choice did they have? Assuming the could afford the candles or oil to read when it grew dark, and they were all done with their endless chores.
At one point the author lauds Summerhill school, an experimental school founded in England in 1921, that still exists. He praises this school, but when I looked in Wikipedia to see what outstanding students this school had turned out, all it listed were: John Burningham, a children's author, Keith Critchlow, an artist, Rebecca De Mornay, an actor, Storm Thorgerson, a rock album cover designer, Gus Dudgeon, a record producer and Mikey Cuddihy, an artist. Now one of these was also a professor or architecture, but this is all that Summerhill can deliver? No outstanding scientists, no such engineers, no such doctors, no great leaders of society?
So how is this of value? If the author had been able to show school after school, that does not restrict admissions, that teaches as he advocates, and that turns out outstanding members of society - people who create, and lead, and invent, and strike out in new directions, then I would believe he has a point to make, but he has failed comprehensively to do this. Despite the lousy (according to his lights) school system, the USA has one of the best educational systems in the world that turns out outstanding people in all fields. So once again, I ask, what is it, exactly, that's so bad about this system and how will this author's assertions improve upon that? And no, I'm not asking for breathless, adolescent, idealistic castles in the sir, but real world examples of what this would bring to the table. The author is completely empty-handed on this measure, it would appear.
Nowhere in this book did I read about any role for parents in their children's education (although admittedly, I skipped much). Why not? Why are parents irrelevant in this "struggle"? This author's problem, I believe, is that he's lacking a sufficiently wide education to know what he's talking about. As with any teenager, he's all idealism and devoid of practicality. He's using anecdote for data and he's trying to parlay idealistic examples into general conclusions. Worse, he's confusing school with college. School is where children get their basic education,. College (university, however you want to describe it) is where they make the very choices he's advocating - choices about which career to follow and which educational path to choose. That's not to say that there should be no such choices or guidance in lower schools, but there's a certain realism which this author seems either loathe to face or of which, at his youthful and inexperienced age, he's either ignorant or foolishly dismissive.
Without that preliminary basic education, children are not equipped to make intelligent informed choices because they do not have the tools to do so. He wants to put education into the hands of the very people who do not have the education and experience to be able to make properly informed choices which will best determine what they need. Suppose, in this free choice, the kids want to spend all day playing video games? Is his system going to allow that? Suppose they don't want to learn to read and write? Suppose they want to hang out under the bleachers drinking and smoking? Is he going to allow all of this? How is letting kids have complete control going to end bullying? What's going to become of such ill-prepared students? Is society going to pay their way throughout their life - to take care of these kids who are completely unprepared for a real life and a career: for finding work and housing, for taking care of their future, their savings, their health, the life, liberty, and happiness? The author is silent on where any of this will lead. And he's woefully ignorant of the fact that play and education can successfully and vitally go hand-in-hand.
A lot of his referents are appallingly outdated. He's referencing and quoting people from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and so on. That's not to say that no one back then had a handle on education, or had anything useful to contribute, but it is to say that the world we live in now is very different from what it was even in the seventies, when no computers existed as far as the general public was concerned. Harking back to ideas from those times might inform as to which directions have worked and - something he fails to address - which haven't, but the mindless wholesale trashing and abandoning of progress that's been made in the last half century in favor of juvenile daydreaming about idyllic golden ages isn't a solution. It's escapism at best and vandalism at worst.
As Michael Douglas, playing President Shephard in The American President put it, "We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them." Maybe this author can reform education, but he's not going to do it by writing frantic books. He's only going to do it by becoming an influential expert on the topic and rolling up his sleeves and getting it done. What Nikhil Goyal most needs to help him get there is - an education! Until then, his fifteen minutes are up.
