Close but no cigar
Once again, David Brooks has written an important column about education. And once again, he offers a vision of modern schooling that is almost perfect — but not quite.
In November 2010, I wrote a piece in response to a Brooks column in which he wrote passionately about our “emotional education” – the elusive, nonlinear and transformative nature of what all learning should look like (knowing that some days we will succeed, and some days we will not). Yet in the same space he wrote uncritically about a “normal schoolroom” in which it is taken as a given that scholastic learning must always be direct, described, and discrete.
This is an important disconnect, and in a column this morning, he makes a similar mistake — this time whiledescribing a remarkable elementary school in Brooklyn that is, as he describes it, “less like a factory for learning
In November 2010, I wrote a piece in response to a Brooks column in which he wrote passionately about our “emotional education” – the elusive, nonlinear and transformative nature of what all learning should look like (knowing that some days we will succeed, and some days we will not). Yet in the same space he wrote uncritically about a “normal schoolroom” in which it is taken as a given that scholastic learning must always be direct, described, and discrete.
This is an important disconnect, and in a column this morning, he makes a similar mistake — this time whiledescribing a remarkable elementary school in Brooklyn that is, as he describes it, “less like a factory for learning