Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979)

For some time I'd been meaning to read two widely cited classics from the 1970s about American education: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Collins's book. I thought of the books as rivals, offering different accounts of education: Bowles and Gintis, who were Marxists at the time, argued that schooling primarily served the function of instilling discipline in workers for the rigors of capitalist work. I assumed that Collins, one of the leading advocates of a conflict theory in sociology, would offer a largely empirical account of how individual competition fueled the race for credentials. The race for credentials, I expected, would only modify, but not constitute, the educational system. To my great and pleasant surprise, Collins turned out to be much more theoretical, and theoretically bold, than I had expected. He argues that education does not provide productivity-enhancing skills. Rather, it's all about carving out "property in positions," i.e. sinecures. Collins supports his claims with evidence of various kinds. Whether he's right or not, I'm not sure; but I found his ideas highly thought-provoking, to say the least. Throughout Collins acknowledges his intellectual debts to Weber and, indeed, reminded me in many ways, both substantively and styllistically, of the master.

Leon Botstein, Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997)

This book launched the network (Bard High School Early Colleges) in which I now teach. Frankly, I had mixed reactions to it. The book is wider ranging than I expected - while Botstein makes arguments that lend themselves to our "early college" model, they are not the focus of the book (which, truth be told, meanders somewhat, though often in interesting directions). In short, I was surprised that this book inspired Michael Bloomberg's chancellor of education to reach out to Botstein and propose a collaboration, which led to the founding of BHSEC Manhattan in 2001. The early parts of the book I found less persuasive. Botstein begins by focusing on - and lamenting - the pervasive pessimism he sees around him, which is a surprising commentary on the go-go '90s. If one were being charitable, one might say it's testimony to Botstein's independence of mind. However, he himself provides plenty of evidence - including the stagnation of middle-class wages since the 1970s - that would seem to make pessimism appear quite warranted. Also unconvincing was his main rationale for having students start college earlier - he rests his case on the earlier physical maturation of adolescents today compared to 50 or 100 years ago (for example, the onset of first menstruation is now more than a year earlier). Botstein never even attempts to show that this physical precocity has been matched by intellectual acceleration. The recent work of Jean Twenge on the "safetyism" of Generation Z (Generations) makes the opposite seem more likely - 16-year-olds today, for example, behave much like 13-year-olds of thirty years ago. In the second half of the book I began to warm to my Founding Father. As unachievable as it may be, his desire to inculcate a passion for learning resonated with me. He cites Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's "flow state" - the intense, edge-of-one's-capabilities engagement of the master musician or craftsman - as what we as teachers should aim to inspire and facilitate in our students. Botstein makes appealing suggestions about how to encourage a sense of wonder, curiosity, and intellectual modesty - all attitudes that I hold dear. So by the end of the book, I found myself engaged by Botstein's outlook and stance toward life, if not fully persuaded by his rationale for early college.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016)

Through his writings and organizational work (establishing the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986), Hirsch has done more than anybody else to promote the importance of knowledge - rather than generic skills and "creativity" - in education. In this persuasive book, he presents evidence that our educational system has been failing for much longer than I understood - since the 1960s, reading comprehension scores of American 17-year-olds have been declining or flat. He attributes this failure to three key ideas of progressive pedagogy: that children's natural curiosity, inclinations, and developmental stages should guide teaching; that education needs to be tailored to each individual ("child-centered" pedagogy is a phrase one hears constantly, and without further explanation, as if its value were self-evident, in these parts); and, most fatally, that schools should aim to teach general skills, rather than knowledge. Hirsch offers plenty of evidence in his indictment of these erroneous idea, but perhaps his most telling evidence comes from France, where a knowledge-centered curriculum was replaced, in 1989, by a progressive approach. Over the next two decades, French education declined on all sorts of measures (see below for more on these criteria). Finally, Hirsch presents his alternative, vocabulary-building and knowledge-rich, curriculum in some detail, and again proffers significant evidence as to its efficacy. In what, though, does this efficacy consist, according to Hirsch? For Hirsch, the advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum are three fold: it improves all students' chances of becoming competent, successful adults; it especially helps students from poor and otherwise deprived backgrounds, thus helping to close the achievement gap (something that Hirsch comes back to repeatedly); finally, a common foundation of knowledge is necessary for meaningful citizenship, and hence for the health of our democracy. Since his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which put him on the map in the education wars, Hirsch has often been tarred as a conservative. (It didn't help him in this regard that Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was, in fact, conservative, came out the same year.) In fact, though, Hirsch's approach is not conservative in any simple sense of the term. It's true that he believes that for children to become successful (in a broad sense of the term) adults, they have to be familiar with what what other adults know - the shared knowledge of the culture, a public good. He thus values this knowledge for pragmatic reasons. But he acknowledges - and even welcomes the fact - that what's shared can grow and change. Another criticism has been that Hirsch's approach requires an even greater emphasis on testing than is the case now. In fact, however, Hirsch expresses criticism of the current scale (and content) of testing, which absorbs a large portion of school time and which, given the fundamental error of trying to teach students generic skills, is bound to produce poor results and frustrated students, teachers, and parents. Hirsch's argument resonates with, and greatly deepens, what I've seen during my last decade of teaching high school. Students' vocabularies and knowledge of the world are suprisingly limited and fragmented. Too seldom does one feel part of a system that is building systematic knowledge.