| View Larger Image | Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality | Paperbackby Charles Murray (Author)
| List Price: | $15.00 | | Price: | $10.20 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Three Rivers Press | | Page Count: | 224 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 25, 2009 | | Sales Rank: | 46,573th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780307405395
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
"The most talked-about education book this semester." —New York TimesBased on a series of controversial Wall Street Journal op-eds, this landmark manifesto gives voice to what everyone knows about talent, ability, and intelligence but no one wants to admit. With four truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.•Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn, but America’s educational system does its best to ignore this.•Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Yet decades of policies have required schools to divert resources to unattainable goals. •Too many people are going to college. Only a fraction of students struggling to get a degree can profit from education at the college level.•America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It is time to start thinking about the kind of education needed by the young people who will run the country. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 39 reviews)
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...of, by and for the elite by M Leslie (Berkeley, CA USA)  3 Stars
November 21, 2009
This is a valuable book in many ways. As a second grade teacher I agree with most of the points he makes. What I find disturbing, or sad, is that, although he expresses sympathy and interest in improving the lot of those less gifted than his audience - he is rather dismissive of the utility of doing much beyond CTE (which I agree is very worthwhile) and not having unrealistic expectations of those not intellectually elite.
I conceive of my job as not just to teach content at the highest intellectual levels possible for my students, which, of course vary greatly. My job is to make it possible for my students to have the best chance of living enjoyable satisfying lives during and especially beyond their school years. For some of the intellectually gifted, as well as those lacking such gifts, it is matter of social and emotional learning. For the less gifted they may not benefit as much in absolute terms from educational interventions but have in relative terms (multiples of what they may otherwise achieve) they have more upside.
The missing part of Mr. Murray's analysis of our education system is nuture - those students who have less horsepower can still vastly increase their academic performance and even outperform the gifted, through hard work and perseverance. In ignoring this Mr. Murray does a great disservice to the many. Of course much what he prescribes would greatly benefit all. Our insistence on college track educations for all is nuts. NCLB, which is both liberal and Bush created monstrosity, is a prime case in point. It is an important part of my job to help lower performing students (whether we're talking academics or social and emotional intelligence) to not get discouraged but to work to improve their abilities as much as possible.
For all this book offers those who are not in the intellectual, and to be societal, elite both in Mr. Murray's attention to the ways they are damaged by the current system and ways they can and should be better served; he is clearly writing to and for the elite. His ignoring, to the point of dismissiveness, of the role of nurture is a disservice to the majority of us and to society as a whole which benefits greatly from an even marginally better educated populace. Moreover it is a disservice to those students who have so much more to achieve in spite of not being brainiacs.
That doesn't obviate the value of what he proposes in this book, as other reviewers have ably pointed out. And those proposals would likely work to the advantage of all. Overall I appreciate Mr. Murray's having written and my having read this book.
For an excellent book on nature and nurture I recommend Judith Ruth Harris', No Two Alike
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
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I wish I had written this book! by Geoff Puterbaugh (Chiang Mai, T. Suthep, A. Muang Thailand)  5 Stars
September 24, 2009
Let us consider the four simple truths offered up for our contemplation.
1. Abilities differ. Frankly, I don't see how anyone playing with a full deck could disagree with this. It's one of the first things we all notice while growing up: people are different. And they are not "just a little different," my friends. People are VASTLY different. Consider Charles Manson and Norman Borlaug, just for starters. (Yes, Google "Norman Borlaug" if you have never heard that name!!!)
2. Half of any population sample is below average for that sample. This is something impossible to disagree with, because it is a tautology. The word AVERAGE means exactly that: 50 percent come in higher, and 50 percent come in lower.
3. Too many Americans are going to college, plus related insights. I believe that the current occupant of the Oval Office has gone on record saying that everyone in America has the "right" to a college education.
4. The fourth truth --- that our future depends on teaching our future leaders well --- may just possibly be controversial, so I won't even touch that. What I will do is to present the reader of this review with the same problem which the author of "Real Education" presents his readers.
QUESTION: Company Bling XYZ had ninety employees a year ago. Since then, the number of employees has increased by ten percent. How many employees does company Bling XYZ employ now? (a) 100 (b) 109 (c) 99 (d) 110.
Almost half of the school-children tested could not answer this question. This is the reality lying behind such abstract ideas as "abilities differ," and "half of the American people are below-average in intelligence." There are, in fact, a lot of interesting and voting people who do not instantly see that the answer to this question is (c) 99.
Would you send these people to college?
My own path to realizing the truth of all this comes from experience in real, live teaching. I taught high-school in Gabes, Tunisia for a year, and in Tunis for another. I taught English in Iran for another two years, and then I taught in Chiang Mai, Thailand for a few more years. When I read articles or propaganda pieces on the Web which talked stuff & nonsense like "UNIVERSAL QUALITY EDUCATION," I began classing such fools as people whom Charles Murray calls "educational romantics." How could we possibly do something as "simple" as "universal quality education?"
Well, how about "universally excellent teachers?" Some new magic (or some new government agency) is suddenly going to cook up a recipe which will make all teachers uniformly excellent? Aside from the obvious fact that teacher excellence is NOT a "uniform government product," but a special gift of some brilliant people ("Teachers, like musicians, are born, not made."), how could anyone imagine that some magic process is going to make all people equal at doing anything? I mean, if you want to make me into a physicist or a figure skater, have at it, dudes.
The second problem, of course, is "universally excellent students," an idea which will bring a hearty laugh to any experienced teacher --- except, perhaps, those who have been lucky enough to teach only pre-med students.
The path to better education includes taking these facts into account. There is no "blank slate," and one size never fits all.
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As described. by Craig A. Robertson (Wenatchee, WA) 5 Stars
September 13, 2009
The book arrived on time and was in the condition specified. I would buy from them again.
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intriguing ideas, a bit drawn out by Boston Reader (Boston, MA USA)  4 Stars
August 29, 2009
This book deserves 5 stars based on Murray's ideas and concrete proposals. It's a short book (about 150 pages of actual text), and worth reading for any educational professional or any person interested in education. I believe that most of Murray's criticism of current education is correct. While I didn't totally buy everything he said, he provided excellent food for thought and debate. The only fault of the book is that he says most of his good stuff at the beginning and at the end, and the middle is a bit dragged out. This seems to be another case of a piece which would best be written in 30-40 pages. Rather than cut it down to a article, the author chose to stretch it out to a short book. Charles Murray once again is not afraid to utter politically incorrect views, in this case, that ability varies, something any teacher knows. Most of the rest of his ideas logically follow from assumption.
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An Insightful call to arms by Bojan Tunguz (Greencastle, IN USA) 5 Stars
August 28, 2009
Charles Murray is one of the best known researchers and writers on various public policy topics. He is oftentimes maligned due to the fact that many of his positions and arguments fly in the face of the popular wisdom and challenge some of our most cherished prejudices. In the case of education, those prejudices have been the source of countless "reforms" that have had very little, if any, impact on the actual achievements of students they were meant to help. The latest one of those attempts, the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) was the immediate inspiration of a series of articles that Charles Murray wrote for the Wall Street Journal. Those articles have been expanded and turned into this book. Because of politically sensitive nature of the topic, Murray is banding backwards to try to make his assumption as uncontroversial as possible and avoid for the most part the minefields of race, class and gender. The four assumptions that he bases all of his arguments are the following:
1. Ability varies.
2. Half of the children are below average.
3. Too many people are going to college.
4. America's future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
The veracity of some of these assumptions can hardly be questioned - the second one is just a tautology. However, most people don't look education or their intellectual ability rationally, so it is worthwhile emphasizing the obvious. On the other hand the last two assumptions are very politically unpopular, and Murray expends considerable amount of space in backing them up and presenting the best possible arguments in their favor.
Unfortunately, I am not too optimistic that this book will have much of an impact on people who really need to make hard political choices. The real hope for change lays elsewhere - in an increasing number of technological and social developments that will create new pressures on the traditional educational system. The advent of the internet and the growing amount of resources for learning outside of the established educational venues will create an incentive for more flexible and diverse educational experience. The globalization of work will create pressures on schools and colleges to become more open to changes that will bring them in line with reality. In a meanwhile, we have to be grateful that there are people out there like Charles Murray who are willing to write so clearly and persuasively about these issues.
This is also probably Charles Murray's most accessible book so far. It is written in a conversational/polemic style with no footnotes, graphs, or tables. It is a very straightforward read and could be finished in a single sitting. Overall, there is so much going for this book that I really hope it will be read by a very wide audience.
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SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book)
by Richard J. Herrnstein (Author), Charles Murray (Author)
Offering a startling perspective on the social and economic problems of contemporary America, a controversial study examines the relationship between ethnicity and intelligence. Reprint. 125,000 first printing. NYT.
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| Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
by Charles Murray (Author)
A sweeping cultural survey reminiscent of Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. "At irregular times and in scattered settings, human beings have achieved great things. Human Accomplishment is about those great things, falling in the domains known as the arts and sciences, and the people who did them.' So begins Charles Murray's unique account of human excellence, from the age of Homer to our own time. Employing techniques that historians have developed over the last century but that...
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| The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide
by Richard Lynn (Author)
Richard Lynn s new book shows that in many multi-racial countries, people of Jewish and East Asian ancestry average highest in IQ and socio-economic position, Whites next highest, South Asians and Hispanics next highest, and people of African descent consistently average at lower levels. Lynn argues that the average population group differences in socio-economic position (education levels, earnings, welfare dependency) are due to their average differences in intelligence. Since these...
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| In Our Hands : A Plan To Replace The Welfare State
by Charles Murray (Author)
Murray offers a plan to eliminate all federal welfare programs and to substitute a $10,000 annual cash grant for everyone age 21 or older.
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| What It Means to Be a Libertarian
by Charles Murray (Author)
Charles Murray believes that America's founders had it right--strict limits on the power of the central government and strict protection of the individual are the keys to a genuinely free society. In What It Means to Be a Libertarian, he proposes a government reduced to the barest essentials: an executive branch consisting only of the White House and trimmed-down departments of state, defense, justice, and environment protection; a Congress so limited in power that it meets only a few months...
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