Product Description
The Educated Child defines a good education and offers parents a plan of action for ensuring that their children achieve it. Combining the goals that William Bennett enumerated as Secretary of Education, key excerpts from E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Sequence, and the latest research, it sets forth clear curricula and specific objectives for children from kindergarten through the eighth grade, including: What children should be studying and the kind of work they… More >>
The Educated Child: A Parents Guide From Preschool Through Eighth Grade
Tags: Child, core knowledge sequence, curricula, e d hirsch, Educated, education, Eighth, eighth grade, from, good education, Grade, Guide, key excerpts, kindergarten, parents, parents guide, Preschool, secretary of education, Through, william bennett
#1 by Anonymous on January 27, 2010 - 10:49 pm
The Educated Child : A Parent’s Guide from Preschool Through Eighth Grade — William J. Bennett, et al,Free Press, New York, 1999
The book is full of credible statements, but will make no difference.
In at least one area, the authors have compounded an omission into a recipe.
To summarize the last statement of their list to reform schools: Expect more get more. This will work for a small portion of students only!
The authors omitted a consideration of what learners think. In the 1960’s Benjamin Bloom stated that schools ask little which young people are incapable of doing. To do well in them, students who are consistent and meticulous in doing homework will almost always pass. But, the others! A study of any student body will discover four genre of young people: those who can and do (quick-willing), those who can and won’t (quick-unwilling); those who can’t and try (slow-willing); and those who can’t and don’t (slow-unwilling). The students who are unwilling are youngsters at risk. They have their own attitude and behavior codes, which include making a joke of the institution which denigrates them. Interpretation of National Assessment of Educational Progress reports will show that over half our teens seriously fall in this group. The willing will always pass state criteria. The unwilling will seldom pass state criteria. They will not work for the highest possible mark. Failing will not be a threat to them. Remediation will have little effect on them.
With higher standards, this failing group will become more alienated and its numbers are likely to grow. Our states with highly structured state demands are usually in mid SAT performance, in spite of the extra money they spend per pupil. Curiously, each educator from those states believes that his or her school is above average or believes in some rationalization on why it is not!
Raising our national average literacy will include appropriately addressing the issue of at-risk students. It is they who resist literacy; they who resist becoming a part of culture; they who are at odds with home, school, society, and clergy. They come from all environments; not necessarily from non-caring parents. They follow their group codes rather than those pf parents, teachers, or clergy. As the numbers of this group lessen, the numbers who are functionally literate will increase.
We have the capacity to identify our at-risk youngsters by Grade Two and salvage them by Grade Eight. But not by using criteria from this book.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by Anonymous on January 28, 2010 - 1:21 am
This book is advocating an elitist and pointless view of education. Bennett, has missed the core issues of what it means to be an educated person, especially in our every widening (global) society. Bennett advocates a people who are full of facts and “trivia” knowledge rather than pushing students to be critical thinkers who can solve problems, read with intelligence, and interact with the world from a stance of tolerance and intelligence. There is no “yard stick” that can measure intelligence. What rubbish. This book is designed to shame parents rather then educate anyone. Don’t waste your time.
Rating: 1 / 5
#3 by Anonymous on January 28, 2010 - 3:59 am
This book is subversive in today’s American culture. It teaches the traditional knowledge and values of Western Civilization. If you read this book and use it with your children, they will be immune to the propaganda of the usual American public school education and will have many problems with their teachers in school – at best they will only be bored, at worst they will end up diagnosed ADHD, on Ritalin and in special education classes at which time they will be throwaway students. Public school education today is all about ecology, multiculturalism and one world government. The 3 R’s and individuality are not emphasized in government schools. Be prepared to homeschool your kids all the way thru school if you teach them anything from this book.
Rating: 4 / 5
#4 by Chris Brand on January 28, 2010 - 5:45 am
‘Parental involvement’ is the core of Bennett et al.’s proposed solution to the problems arising from the neosocialist take-over of education which has focused teachers’ attention obsessively on minorities. With a remorseless insistence that only 664 pages can supply, the authors set out a programme of parental activism so daunting that no ambitious parent could complain that the authors’ inspiration ever failed. No advice for parents and children is too trite to be abjured by the authors:
“Every morning you must send him off to school with a good night’s sleep, a decent breakfast and a positive attitude towards learning.” “Good penmanship requires discipline. . .we urge you to work on neatness and legibility with your child at home.” “Call out vocabulary words, spelling words, or math facts to your child.”
Children and their teachers must be constantly monitored, hectored, rewarded and punished – the children by TV-deprivation and school principals by protests and demonstrations from angry parents. Repeatedly, ambitious parents are advised to ’spend a few minutes each day’ reading to their child, listening to their child, talking with their child, improving diction, visiting public libraries, mastering computing, going out on the Net, revising drafts of the child’s homework, sitting in on classes, harrying teachers, writing to the school principal or organizing parent groups. Altogether, the book offers some 1,000 advices to anxious parents as to how to fill gaps in their days, and some 500 ways of detecting failures in their children’s schools. The “minutes” add up to a massive investment: apparently not a single day can develop under its own logic or with much input from the child.
‘The Educated Child’ offers a plausible, if undocumented critique of America’s educational problems; and plenty of improving ideas which will look reasonable so long as the parent does not move from the armchair to attempt to implement more than one or two of them. What is missing is any hard core of realism, and in particular any mention of IQ. By all means, the authors occasionally favour matching education to children’s “abilities” so as to supply sufficient challenge and encouragement to all; and they correctly dismiss as hooey the unsubstantiated opinion of Harvard University’s Howard Gardner that there are lots of different types of intelligence (a dogma allowing teachers to maintain a febrile optimism that every child is a genius at something). Yet school tracking is buried among endless tips for what worried parents should do around the house; and Bennett et al. cannot bring themselves to mention human psychology’s best-known and most researched variable which alone might provide a fair and sensible way of assigning children to different school tracks.
Rating: 2 / 5
#5 by Arlie C. Edwards on January 28, 2010 - 7:44 am
This book is a must for anyone interested in the education movement. However, after such reports as “Why Johnny can’t read” and a plethora of other well documented works, many have come to the conclusion that the public schools are not working and are beyond help; therefore, a work of this nature is wasted upon that system. This book’s value lies in providing the objective research that supports a structured curriculum based educational system for those who have jetisoned the public schools as a failed and irrepairable system and now or in the future will home school thier children. However, within the home school movement there is a very small but vocal group that call themselves “unschoolers”. They adhere to the philosophy that the child will learn whatever he needs just by allowing the child to select his own curriculum content. Bennett, in this work, lays the coup de grace at the root of that theory, and I hope for ever more settles the issue of whether the “unschooling” mindset is a viable alternative to a curriculum directed home school.
Rating: 5 / 5