The Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, offers a powerful, compelling, and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas--by one of America's most important educators, and author of the bestselling Cultural Literacy.

For over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning "process" should be emphasized over the facts taught. All of this is tragically wrong.

Renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues that, by disdaining content-based curricula while favoring abstract--and discredited--theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive, information-based economy in which we now live, our schools' practices have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn.

With an introduction that surveys developments in education since the hardcover edition was published, The Schools We Need is a passionate and thoughtful book that will appeal to the millions of people who can't understand why America's schools aren't educating our children.

• Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories
• The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children
• Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
• Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform
• HarperCollins College Outline Introduction to Statistics (HARPERCOLLINS COLLEGE OUTLINE SERIES)
• Research on Educational Innovations
• Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It
• Dewey on Education: Selections, no.3 (Classics in Education Series)
• How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition
• Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools