Doomed to Fail: The Built-in Defects of American Education - Hardcover

Zoch, Paul A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566635675 ISBN 13: 9781566635677

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2004

Synopsis

Since hardly anyone is happy with American schools, it's always open season for school reform-with inevitable calls for better teaching, better curriculums, better organization, etc., etc. In these continuing exhortations, little attention is paid to the role of the students themselves, the object of the "learning process." In this explosive book, Paul Zoch argues that what America most needs to improve its schools is not necessarily better teachers but a wholesale shift in the way it thinks about who or what creates academic success. The tendency to look to teachers for students' achievement, he maintains, is the cause of low performance. Tracing the development of educational ideas in the United States from the time of William James to the present day, Mr. Zoch shows how they have given the schools an obsessive focus on teachers and their teaching methods while neglecting the disciplined effort and hard work that students must expend in order to achieve. Because most students, in accordance with society's prevailing views, see their success as a product of what their teachers do, they devote little effort to their studies and, predictably enough, learn little. Their dedication to schoolwork, as Mr. Zoch demonstrates, falls far short of that routinely displayed by students in other, less prosperous countries. Doomed to Fail is one of the freshest and most compelling investigations of the plight of our schools to appear in many years. It is sure to create a beehive of controversy.

About this title

About the Author

Paul A. Zoch studied classics at the University of Texas and Indiana University, and has taught high school in Texas for sixteen years. He has participated in-and been subject to-a myriad of school reform initiatives, but he knows firsthand why they fail. He has also written Ancient Rome: An Introductory History. He is married and has a daughter, and lives in Missouri City, Texas.

Reviews

A teacher of high school Latin and a classics scholar, Zoch joins traditionalist critics like his mentor, Diane Ravitch, in blaming all of the ills of modern U.S. education on the "Progressive Paradigm" associated with John Dewey. There are some interesting chapters on educational history; unfortunately, their purpose is more to make ideological points than generate understanding. A good deal of the book is devoted to building the argument that the prime responsibility for learning rests with students, not teachers, and that the idea that learning is attributable to good teaching sets teachers up for failure. While Zoch presents legitimate criticisms of today's students, society's educational expectations and the excesses of the "learning styles" specialists, the narrow purpose of the text prevents a more nuanced discussion of the drawbacks and merits of innovative forms of pedagogy. One waits until the end of the book to discover Zoch's prescription for improving education: we should take note of the Japanese educational model. The fact that Japanese schools are highly centralized and rigidly structured is outweighed, from his perspective, by their academically rigorous curriculum. Zoch doesn't mention that the Japanese system suffers tremendous numbers of school dropouts and has begun emulating the U.S. schools that he so decries.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566635675
• ISBN 13: 9781566635677
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260