Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education - Hardcover

Bauer, Susan Wise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393285960 ISBN 13: 9780393285963

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

A best-selling expert on education shows how to make the school system work for your child.

Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all―or even most―students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels over differences in learning style.

Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into “fixing” their children rather than questioning the system.

With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child.

In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to flex the K–12 system, rather than the child. She closely analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from giftedness (not as much of a “gift” as you might think!).

As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work. Her advice here is comprehensive and anecdotal, including material drawn from experience with her own four children and more than twenty years of educational consulting and university teaching.

Rethinking School is a guide to one aspect of sane, humane parenting: negotiating the twelve-grade school system in a way that nurtures and protects your child’s mind, emotions, and spirit.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Wise Bauer is a writer, educator, and historian. Her previous books include the Writing With Ease, Writing With Skill, and Story of the World series from Well-Trained Mind Press, as well as The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Rethinking School, The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, and the History of the World series, all from W. W. W. Norton. She has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William & Mary in Virginia, as well as an M.A. in seventeenth-century literature and a Master of Divinity in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature. For fifteen years, she taught literature and composition at the College of William and Mary.

From School Library Journal

Bauer, coauthor of The Well-Trained Mind and an advocate for aclassical education through homeschooling, offers a detailed look at how modern schooling can be a mismatch for student's needs. For those with a disability, a developmental delay, or giftedness, the structure of age-based classes focused on a single way of understanding and behaving may not work. Bauer breaks down ways in which this system is failing these students and offers advice on how to work around it to find better options for students. While Bauer does advocate for ways to help the system accommodate individuals, including having frank discussions with principals and teachers, she also advocates for getting out of it entirely. This bias toward homeschooling influences everything Bauer presents; however, even with this partiality, the balance of firsthand stories of school failure combined with the author's own experiences and practical tips make this book very straightforward and informative. VERDICT For parents seeking support and advice for ways to address their discontent with their children's schooling.—Rachel Wadham, Brigham Young University Libraries, Provo, UT

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0393285960
• ISBN 13: 9780393285963
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288