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.