Do Schools Wound? Part 2.

Book recommendation:  Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in School and Standing Up to Old School Culture.

For ten years, the author, Kirsten Olson,  followed and interviewed one hundred students, teachers, and parents to discover their common school experiences.  Why were so many kids disengaged with the school experience?  Why did so many gifted teachers leave the field within three years?  Why did students experience themselves not as learners in an active process of becoming more literate, but as losers, failures, and/or outcasts?  Why did parents give up, (at best) ultimately encouraging their children to tow the line and get through the process?

I wrote a bit about this last summer.  Hope you'll read the book.

sdntroversial new book says that the way we educate millions of American children alienates students from a fundamental pleasure in learning, and that pleasure in learning is essential to real engagement, creativity, intellectual entrepreneurship, and a well lived life.

Based on almost a decade of intensive autobiographical interviews with over 100 "ordinary" students, teachers, and parents, Wounded By School describes some of the dilemmas of those in school now. Students talk about intensive boredom and daily disengagement, while knowing that school "matters" more than ever.  Students and teachers describe a grinding lack of meaning in their work, combined with intensive labeling, tracking and shrink-wrapping of learners based on cursory tests and poor understanding of many kinds of minds.

Wounded By School identifies seven kinds of common school wounds, and tells the stories of those who have experienced them.

This controversial new book says that the way we educate millions of American children alienates students from a fundamental pleasure in learning, and that pleasure in learning is essential to real engagement, creativity, intellectual entrepreneurship, and a well lived life.

Based on almost a decade of intensive autobiographical interviews with over 100 "ordinary" students, teachers, and parents, Wounded By School describes some of the dilemmas of those in school now. Students talk about intensive boredom and daily disengagement, while knowing that school "matters" more than ever.  Students and teachers describe a grinding lack of meaning in their work, combined with intensive labeling, tracking and shrink-wrapping of learners based on cursory tests and poor understanding of many kinds of minds.

This controversial new book says that the way we educate millions of American children alienates students from a fundamental pleasure in learning, and that pleasure in learning is essential to real engagement, creativity, intellectual entrepreneurship, and a well lived life.

Based on almost a decade of intensive autobiographical interviews with over 100 "ordinary" students, teachers, and parents, Wounded By School describes some of the dilemmas of those in school now. Students talk about intensive boredom and daily disengagement, while knowing that school "matters" more than ever.  Students and teachers describe a grinding lack of meaning in their work, combined with intensive labeling, tracking and shrink-wrapping of learners based on cursory tests and poor understanding of many kinds of minds.