Friday, April 26, 2013

Daily Kos: An important book about education

Daily Kos: An important book about education:


An important book about education

is by Mike Rose of UCLA, and is titled Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves A
Second Chance at Education.
  What follows is a cross-posting of this review which went live yesterday.
------------------------
In all our discussions about education policy, too often we do not consider what happens to those students who do not “make it” in K-12 but later in life are prepared to undertake responsibility for their education.  After what is listed as the title of his latest book, Mike Rose has on the cover the following words, which are an apt description of this volume:
An Argument for Democratizing Knowledge in America
He emphasizes this point in his one-page preface, titled “Second Chances:”
Back to School demonstrates what education can do, even though it was often earlier schooling that let people down. . . . When we are at our best as a society, our citizens are not trapped by their histories.  Sadly this possibility is shrinking, partly because of a damaged an unstable economy but more so because of our political response to the economy.  There are better ways to respond and to foster the growth of a wider sweep of our population.  I hope Back to School points us in that direction (p.xiii).
Rose uses a combination of narratives of students he has encountered, his own experiences working with the populations he focuses on in the volume, and a substantial amount of what data is available about the functioning