One book that got a little bit of attention, and a lot of Indigo/Chapters shelf space, over the Christmas period was a little tome called The Curiosity of School, by Ontario freelance writer, Xander Sherman. While the book does contain the occasional nugget (the bits on testing are kind of fun), it remains unquestionably the worst book I’ve ever read on education!
The basic thesis here – from the home-schooled Sherman – is that School gets in the way of real education, and is hence a Bad Thing. We know school is bad because the compulsory school system we have today is Prussian in origin, and Prussia = militarism, and militarism = Bad. Apparently, claims Sherman, Prussia made education compulsory to secretly train an army after defeat by Napoleon (not true: Frederick the Great introduced compulsory education in the 1760s). This, Sherman continues, made Prussia the first place in the world to make education compulsory (again, not true: Scotland did it in the late 1600s). Prussians from Bad Blankenburg (which, in fact, was not actually part of Prussia) inverted kindergardens in the 1830s (although, in reality, London’s Infant Schools predate this by about 15 years); and reformers from the “Prussian” University of Gottingen (which is actually part of Hanover) played their part, as did the Prussian-invented system of Normal Schools (which was actually a French invention).
Then there is his take on Canadian education. He seems to believe that the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), is an arm of the federal government. The pan-Canadian student assessment, in Sherman’s estimation, is the result of business pressure on CMEC and the Canadian Council on Learning. And those high rates of Canadian participation in PISA are not, apparently, because we want each province to have a significant sample, but rather are because HRDC needs the data to implement reforms.
Need more? A four-year degree at Harvard apparently costs $500,000. The Kamehameha schools are bracketed with Andover as bastions of educational privilege when, in fact, they are schools for native Hawaiians. In three separate spots, Sherman describes “endowments” as flows, rather than stocks – hence, Mount Allison apparently receives $80 million every year from its endowment.
But it’s not just the mistakes that mark out the book as bad, it’s the reliance on a form of argumentation which might charitably be described as cherry-picking. After excoriating standardized testing as worthless, Sherman pulls out PISA results as evidence of Finland’s excellence. When he wants to show the evils of money in public education, he refers to massive losses at Canadian university endowment funds in 2008. When he talks about the unfairness of the massive inequality in resources between private and public education, he cites the massive gains in Harvard’s endowment in 2011.
Keep your money. Avoid the book.
Tweet this post
You do know that the Prussian Model of education is the model we use today the world over. I’m not defending Shermans book, I’ve never even read it. I just want to point out the validity of this evidence because this system is designed to take critical thinking out of schooling and its been successful in doing so for the over a century. There may have been other educational models that sprung up prior or since then but the model we have now is largely based on that old Prussian education system.
Hi Stephen. Thanks for reading our stuff.
Think about it – before the prussians came along, most schooling was handled by the churches. How free-thinking do you think that was?
I know this line about Prussia gets pedalled a lot, but pedagogically, I can’t see any difference between what Prussians were doing and what anyone else was doing at the time. What’s distinct about Prussia, as near as I can tell, is bureaucracy and funding. They were among the first (you could build a case for Scotland as well) to have something approaching universal public access and, as a corollary, they were among the first to set a standardized curriculum across schools. But “taking critical thinking out of schools”? It was never there to begin with.