Chance – Module 5
Further Reading
The readings suggested in this section all relate to the view of teaching and learning presented on this website. While the selections are varied and eclectic, they are all eminently readable and espouse a humanistic rather than mechanistic approach to education.
How Children Learn by John Holt is a book every parent and teacher should read. An articulate critic of what is wrong in schools, Holt advocated sensible teaching practices based on the natural eagerness of children (and adults) to learn. “How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task.” If you read only one work by Holt, indeed, if you read just one book on this list, this is the one I recommend. The John Holt GWS website provides free access to some of Holt’s writing.
Jonathan Kozol’s first book on education, Death at an Early Age, is a classic but all his works are moving and inspiring. A great fighter for social justice and public education, Kozol is an unfailing champion of the student. “No Child Left Behind’s fourth-grade gains aren’t learning gains, they’re testing gains. That’s why they don’t last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.” For more information about Kozol, visit his website.
There is no better writer today about education than Alfie Kohn. A staunch critic of standardized testing and excessive (and unproductive) homework, Kohn addresses a multitude of educational issues in writing that is lucid and supported by abundant research. No Contest and Punished by Rewards are two of my favorites, but a great place to become familiar with Kohn is his website, where you can read many of his essays for free.
Jim Trelease’s best selling book The Read-aloud Handbook, is another book that every parent and teacher should read. It is full of straightforward and well-documented advice about how to make reading a joyful experience for children. His website provides lots of information and resources.
The late Earl Stevick made many important contributions to the field of foreign language instruction. His book, Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways, aimed at language instructors rather than a general audience is so extraordinary that I feel compelled to include it here. In examining three language teaching methodologies (Community Language Learning, Silent Way, Suggestopedia), the book offers tremendous insights about learning. Stevick invokes Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov as well as Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death to cast light on the nature of learning and uses the wonderful phrase “primacy in a world of meaningful action,” to describe the affective requisite of a student’s situation in the classroom for learning to take place.
Frank Smith is a psycholinguist and leading authority on reading. His informative book Reading Without Nonsense is a pleasure to read and dispels of some of the nonsense unfortunately incorporated in educational programs supposedly designed to help students develop reading skills.
In The Natural Approach, Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell articulate a number of linked hypotheses about second language acquisition which have important implications for all kinds of learning, including the ideas that unconscious learning occurs through participation in activities and that learning occurs incrementally as new content is added to what is already known (i+1). In other work, Krashen provides evidence that students develop language and reading skills more readily through pleasurable reading than through arduous lessons in vocabulary and syntax. Free access to online readings are available on Krashen’s website. A good first introduction to Krashen’s ideas is this video of one of his lectures.
References to Carl Rogers have been made in various places on this site. Many of his ideas about education can be found in the volume Freedom to Learn. A quick introduction to Rogers’ ideas about education are available on this website.
I have indicated that the educational ideas presented on this site are relevant for disciplines other than language arts. Paul Lockhart’s passionate treatise, A Mathematician’s Lament, confirms this idea. He asserts that “Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them,” and that the math “curriculum is obsessed with jargon and nomenclature seemingly for no other purpose than to provide teachers with something to test the students on” – notions perfectly understandable to the language arts teacher. A good part of this treatise is available here.