A great antidote and partial explanation into the world of schooling in the US and elsewhere. I felt there was sometimes too much ranting without any admission of the positive role schooling can and does play for children. It feels that the author is to the point of merely demonizing the entire establishment b/c that is easier than dealing with the nuances of reality.

Additionally, the book is very poorly edited. For instance, on pages 52-53, we see different versions of the same paragraph (begins with "We used to make steel, now we make bubbles...") that seems to me like a gross oversight. There are other instances of poor readability and editing, such as referring back to themes that haven't yet been introduced--what? And as one who is so critical of lazy thinking and poor schooling, shouldn't the author be more rigorous in his own writing? Perhaps his excuse is that he too is a product of the monstrous school system? The book is not at all coherent, rather it is a collection of former speeches that have been lightly touched up but in no way corralled into a cognizant whole.

That said, the content and anecdotes are generally provocative and open up what I think on the whole is a positive inquiry into the purpose and efficacy of schools.

This book has encouraged me to read and re-read the classics and look into the lives of some other notable people: Ben Franklin's autobiography; David Farragut (America's first admiral, took command of a captured British ship at age 12); Shen Wenrong (See Financial Times, March 17, 2006) who led an army of Chinese peasants without computers or any other sophisticated planning to move an entire steel plant from Germany to near Shanghai in about half the time the German engineers had estimated it would take; the story of Sir Richard Branson being told by his mother to find his way home as a 4-year-old from a place miles from their home (see also New Yorker article in May 2007); Dr. Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time;

Contrasting schooling and education: "...Schooling is a matter of habit and attitude training. It takes place from the outside in. Education is a matter of self-mastery, first; then self-enlargement, even self-transcendence--as all possibilities of the human spirit open themselves into zones for exploration and understanding." (p. 61) "Education must be largely self-initiated, a tapestry woven out of broad experience, constant introspection, ability to concentrate on one's purpose in spite of distractions, a combination of curiosity, patience, and intense watchfulness, and it requires substantial trial and error risk-taking, along with a considerable ability to take feedback from the environment-to learn from mistakes." (p. 62)

My reading opened a strong debate with my wife about the merits of home-schooling, but in the end I agreed that this alternative also has its own glaring shortfalls: lack of specialized skills on the part of the parent to plan and execute curricula on a variety of subjects (or this would take a rather inordinate amount of time). Home-schooling is anecdotally related by my wife to social awkwardness and a bizarre sort of atrophy of the ability to deal with others. I have no scientific basis for this correlation, and am open to contrary evidence.

In the end my wife and I agreed that for all its faults, public/private schooling should be augmented by high expectations and extracurricular activities by us as parents to encourage education and learning as a pursuit worthy in-and-of itself and to encourage qualities and attributes that make for a principled, critically-thinking and moral human being.