Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education

A prominent educator draws on experiences from his life and illustrious career to offer an impassioned critique of American schools—and the current central government assertion of authority over what had long been a local and regional concern

This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth.

Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines—guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child’s educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.

“A forceful, hard-hitting, and sensibly directed critique of American schooling, one that also sets forth a convincing plan for reform that policy-makers, parents, and general readers need to consider.”—Gerald Graff, author of Clueless in Academe

Theodore R. Sizer is the founder and chairman emeritus of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of schools and centers engaged in restructuring and redesigning schools. University Professor Emeritus at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Education at Harvard University and Brandeis University, he is the author of many books, including Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.

This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth.

Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines—guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child’s educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.