Redesigning Education

Kenneth G. Wilson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educational reformer, argues that American public education is dangerously out of step with the demands of today's postindustrial, knowledge-based society. "What educators need most is to find an organizing, driving vision - a new paradigm powerful enough to promise a systematic redesign of American public education." But until we upset traditional assumptions about education, Wilson and coauthor Bennett Daviss warn, necessary reforms will languish regardless of their importance.
Combining Wilson's experience in science and industry and curriculum design with Daviss's experience as a journalist specializing in education, Redesigning Education shows how the redesign process can produce a series of integrated changes around which a national educational infrastructure can develop. To spread the most effective ideas from school to school, the authors envision a national educational system modeled on the Agricultural Extension Service.
Wilson and Daviss offer evidence to suggest that a basic shift away from a set of century-old assumptions may already be under way. A school-restructuring program devised at Johns Hopkins University, for example, reveals that when detailed authority over curricula is taken away from regulatory bureaucracies and is organized across a network of schools backed by a research and development organization, learning improves markedly. Several studies demonstrate that groups of students working together learn more than students studying alone. Reading Recovery, a unique method of teaching lagging first-graders to read, indicates that research, development, and ongoing teacher education can - contrary to conventional wisdom - play a crucial part in making teaching and learning more efficient and effective, even in the most difficult teaching situations.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wilson and journalist Daviss, who view contemporary American education as backward and static, here offer hypothetical correctives, some of them based on real-life educational programs and experiments. The authors advocate change-both specific reforms and change itself accepted as an ongoing modus operandi and a standard. "Americans pride themselves on 'can do' and 'getting the job done,' not on their powers of analysis and reflection," they complain, arguing that only the pursuit of multidisciplinary lifelong learning can equip us to meet the future's increasingly complex challenges. Wilson and Daviss want reform in teacher training, with emphasis on inquiry as a mode of learning and of teaching; better knowledge among teachers of the subjects taught; continuing professional growth fostered by intermittent retraining; building better bridges between education research and its practice; and increased use of technology in the classroom. They stress that a more active, committed and imaginative approach to education can save us from slipping as a nation. They are persuasive.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nobel prizewinning physicist Wilson tries to illuminate the black hole that is the American educational system. Wilson and journalist Daviss begin where good science begins: defining the problem. US education, they argue, is based on a model--a 19th-century assembly-line model--that simply doesn't work any more. Tinkering, as in raising teachers' salaries or extending the school day, won't solve the problem. What will, among other things, is looking to the successes of corporations in what Wilson and Daviss call the redesign process. It begins with a ``compelling vision'' and continues in the pursuit of excellence through a process of ``research, development, dissemination, and refinement.'' Boeing, Apple, and the Union Pacific Railroad are examples of companies that have used that formula to advantage, involving customers and workers in the redesign. None of these ideas are new, nor are the components they suggest for redesigning education, including Total Quality Learning as demonstrated in Sitka, Alaska (based on Total Quality Management, it involves consulting the ``customer,'' in this case children, teachers, and parents); the idea of students learning from one another; and the more sophisticated and general use of computers as tools for both students and teachers. What is refreshing is the emphasis on relieving teachers of their classroom isolation and offering them professional support and opportunities for continuing development. The authors envision (and offer a budget for) a group of nationwide lab schools, that would draw teachers from surrounding districts to experiment with new programs, new systems, and new ways of managing and teaching. Teachers would then return to their districts to train their colleagues. Still another look at what's wrong with our schools, but one that that targets what makes educational reform so elusive: a continuing communications gap between the classroom teacher--the one who really matters--and the rest of the education profession. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wilson draws on his experience in science and industry to show how the redesign process can aid in the development of a new educational infrastructure. Wilson, along with journalist Daviss, presents numerous examples of how success is achieved in industry. Scientific achievements that have caused fundamental changes in society would not have happened without such built-in structures for change. American education lacks this technological culture, argue the authors, who see the traditional mode of combining teaching and research as inherently flawed. While the idea of superimposing the corporate model on schools is hardly original, the authors offer some uncommon solutions. Recommended for large education collections.
Arla Lindgren, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.