Synopses & Reviews
Our public schools are in danger of collapse, and if they do, we will all pay the priceHealthy public schools are essential for a healthy economy and creating informed citizens. But we are neglecting our schools in a perversely malicious way: making impossible demands on them, strangling them financially, creating trivial changes for the sake of ideology, avoiding necessary changes, and just plain ignoring them.
In this forcefully argued and convincing book, education expert Charles Ungerleider makes our situation plain. Canadians have never placed a higher value on education, but if we do not do something about public schools now, we may lose the benefits that they provide and miss the opportunity to fix them.
Drawing on the latest research and using examples from across the country, Ungerleider describes whats right and whats wrong about our public schools system and provides solutions for making them a lot better. He looks at the conflict between “traditional” and “progressive” approaches to education. He argues that the public school curriculum has become bloated, fragmented, and mired in trivia. He examines the effects of the changing family and the influence on children of television, the Internet, video games, and their peers. He discusses the work of teachers and teachers unions, the changes in public school finance and governance, and the issue of accountability. And he takes on the issue of school choice and competition, where, more than anywhere else, rhetoric prevails over reason.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Charles Ungerleider was Associate Dean for teacher education at the University of British Columbia from 1993 to 1998, then Deputy Minister of Education for B.C. from 1998 to 2001. He is currently a professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Educational Studies at UBC. He lives in Vancouver.
From the Hardcover edition.