Customer Review
A Classic of Education Research, October 8, 2000 - Reviewer: Dr Rich Gibson from San Diego California
This fine readable book seems timeless in a new era of standardization and high-stakes testing in schools. The author, in brilliantly researched detail, demonstrates the institutionalization of alienation (the loss of control over the processes and products of labor) in U.S. schools. He traces the relationships of the rise of the mad career of F.E.W. Taylor, whose early 1900's management style sought to strip skilled industrial workers of their minds and skills, with parallel events in education. Coupled with the fascinating short film, "Clockwork," this book can be an important tool in grappling with questions about the reasons for authoritarian and apparently irrational approaches to schooling. Today, teachers still struggle for control of their workplaces. They battle the efforts to replace their minds in the classroom with the minds of test-publishers and standards writers whose partisan desires are rooted in dividing children even more deeply by race and class. The fight in schools is not only about production quotas, as the author shows, but about what people will know and how they will come to know it-and who makes those decisions. Hence, teachers, like their working class predecessors, can learn a lot from the history in this text which strips away the mysteries of why many schools look like they do. |
