Product Description
What is wrong with education? Why do educational reforms always miss their target? How can we create a better education system? And what can we learn from other countries? Reclaiming Education tackles the challenges facing education that really matter – the ones that academics often ignore, parents demand solution to and politicians need to confront. Drawing on his global research, James Tooley shows that there is an alternative to poor quality and wasteful ineffici… More >>
#1 by Christopher Chantrill on January 28, 2010 - 4:26 pm
James Tooley and Andrew Coulson (see below) continue the tradition of E.G. West in asking the big question about education. What’s with this idea of government schooling anyway?
In Reclaiming Education Tooley constructs an imaginary focus group to ask an even bigger question. If we started again from scratch how would we think about education and schooling? Well, we certainly wouldn’t pack kids off for 12 years of monopoly government schooling.
While we are asking questions, how come that there are plenty of failed government schools but no failed Wal-Marts? Could it be that food markets have a brand to protect and so deploy training, quality control, and research and development to make sure that every store in the chain delivers the same retail food experience?
So why wouldn’t the same principle apply to child education? Actually it already does. Out in the developing world there are private companies–NIIT in India, Pitagoras in Brazil, TECSUP in Peru, and Educor in South Africa–delivering low-cost branded education, and they are rapidly expanding. They are ruthless about controlling quality, getting feedback from their students, and exploiting market opportunities.
Read all about it. Then dare to imagine a chain of Edu-Marts in the United States delivering low-coast quality education in the inner city.
Tooley will change the way you think about education.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Andrew Coulson on January 28, 2010 - 4:26 pm
Most education policy discussions revolve around the merits of this or that reform to our existing public schools, failing to even consider alternative education systems. These discussions are rendered moot by the far more profound analysis presented in Reclaiming Education. With this work, James Tooley addresses a question that few other scholars have had the vision or the expertise to ask: What sort of education system will _best_ serve the public? The cogency of his answer and the soundness of the evidence and arguments on which it is based make Reclaiming Education one of the finest and most important books on education policy ever written…
Rating: 5 / 5