The Schools We Need
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Narrated by:
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Anna Fields
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By:
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E.D. Hirsch Jr.
About this listen
As renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues in The Schools We Need, in disdaining content-based curricula for abstract, and discredited, theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive, information-based economy in which we now live, our school practices have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn.
There is a solution. Mainstream research has shown that if children, all children, not just the privileged, are taught in ways that emphasize hard work, the learning of facts, and rigorous testing, their enthusiasm for school will grow, their test scores will rise, and they will become successful citizens in the information-age civilization.
Click here to listen to other books by this author including Cultural Literacy.©1996 E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (P)1997 Blackstone AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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"[Hirsch's] book presents a sophisticated, scholarly, and often compelling argument, and it deserves serious consideration, whatever one's political predilections." (The New York Times Book Review)
"A damning, highly provocative, full-scale assault on today's educational establishment." (Publishers Weekly)
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Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.
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Good intentions, terrible execution
- By Kristofer Jarl on 05-06-19
By: Todd Rose
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In Defense of History
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.
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Enlightening
- By David A on 07-03-18
By: Richard J. Evans
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Gifts Differing
- Understanding Personality Type
- By: Isabel Briggs Myers, Peter B. Myers - with
- Narrated by: Patricia Rodriguez
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Like a thumbprint, personality type provides an instant snapshot of a person's uniqueness. Drawing on concepts originated by Carl Jung, this audiobook distinguishes four categories of personality styles and shows how these qualities determine the way you perceive the world and come to conclusions about what you've seen. It then explains what they mean for your success in school, at a job, in a career, and in your personal relationships.
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half/half
- By Lillianne on 03-19-19
By: Isabel Briggs Myers, and others
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Mindware
- Tools for Smart Thinking
- By: Richard E. Nisbett
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Many scientific and philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives at home, work, and school to help us think smarter and more effectively about our behavior and the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail, offering a tool kit for better thinking and wiser decisions.
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Sound scientific advice on how to live your life
- By Neuron on 08-26-15
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The New Education
- How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux
- By: Cathy N. Davidson
- Narrated by: Carolyn Cook
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation's new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T. As Cathy Davidson argues in The New Education, this approach to education is wholly unsuited to the era of the gig economy.
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Practical Enough / Scholarly Enough
- By Amazon Customer on 07-22-20
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Choice Words
- How Our Language Affects Children's Learning
- By: Peter H. Johnston
- Narrated by: Peter H. Johnston
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In productive classrooms, teachers don't just teach children skills, they build emotionally and relationally healthy learning communities. Teachers create intellectual environments that produce not only technically competent students, but also caring, secure, actively literate human beings.
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Check it out at the library or don't
- By Lesley on 04-01-12
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Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
- By: Richard Hofstadter
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This book throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.
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Fifty years later, still valid today
- By David Evan Glasser on 11-13-18
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The War Against Boys
- How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men
- By: Christina Hoff Sommers
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic - now more relevant than ever - argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs. After two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being. Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it's time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help.
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Important Book
- By VeritasPlz on 11-05-18
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Losing Ground
- American Social Policy, 1950 - 1980
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Robert Morris
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in the 1950s, America entered a period of unprecedented social reform. This remarkable book demonstrates how the social programs of the 1960s and ’70s had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination. Using widely understood and accepted data, it conclusively demonstrates that the amalgam of reforms from 1965 to 1970 actually made matters worse.
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A great book ruined by a terrible recording
- By Michael on 04-05-13
By: Charles Murray
What listeners say about The Schools We Need
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- Consumer_Sovereignty
- 11-18-19
He warned us
Hirsch warned America about the dangers of the progressives 25 years ago. We didn’t listen. We get what we deserve.
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- Thucydides
- 04-21-18
challenged everything I learned in my B.Ed.
I love to read well-articulated challenges to dominant opinions. this book intelligently challenges sacred dogmas such as 'child-centric' and 'hands-on' learning with evidence and logic. Hirsch is compassionate with heartfelt concern for inequity in American education. I now have much to ponder and a lot more reading and research to do!
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2 people found this helpful
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- LEB
- 04-23-17
Eye Opening
What did you love best about The Schools We Need?
It was interesting to learn about the history of the predominat educational philosophies.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
This book paints a picture of what education should and could be.
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- cmurray
- 06-09-18
Overwhelming condescension
Getting past the narrator’s incredibly condescending tone made this book a true slog. She had perfect diction, pronunciation and enunciation, but her tone was over the top. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the intention. Was she chosen so that she could make readers feel ashamed for even slightly taking issue with the content of the book? The book, as a result, came off angry and sarcastic. I pictured all of the educators who are completely resistant to the idea that things are not perfect, clinging to every word in this book as a vindication. I saw all of the educators who’ve cracked jokes over the years about passing educational fads as if that was an excuse for unexamined practices.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Douglas
- 09-19-11
Good Companiion Piece To...
Where does The Schools We Need rank among all the audiobooks you???ve listened to so far?
Bloom's CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, but read Bloom first. Hirsch does a nice job criticizing the dumbing-down backlash in American education resultant of the anti-intellectual movement of the 1960's (actually, he dates the beginnings of the movement back to Romantic Era Germany and France). He shows how what schools need is a balance of fact and imagination rather than all or one of the other, demonstrates that it is not that standardized tests are culturally biased, but rather that minorities are not as well educated at home or in intercity schools, and generally dispels a lot of the misconceptions that have been very dominant in American mis-education since Kirkpatrick.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Nathan
- 04-24-22
still pertinent and fascinating
Wiith the post-covid rush to eliminate testing and the push of racial sectarianism, the antidote of this book is needed more than ever.
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- Kimberly Alizadeh Ashrafi
- 07-12-23
Informational text: listen in small chunks
Comprehensive analysis on education in the U.S. There’s no pdf that goes with it and at times the text can seem repetitive, thus it can be challenging to absorb the concrete message that the author wants to convey. It’s more of a comparison of all models imaginable in U.S.education. I had to stop and rewind frequently to absorb the information in more manageable chunks. It’s a must read if you are interested in understanding American education system, education policy, or as a parent.
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- Nathan Parker
- 05-18-21
Devastating critique of modern education ideology
Even though this book was written over 25 years ago, it could have been written yesterday. Education mainstream instructional methodology is dominated by what is labeled "progressive", even though it doesn't have anything to do with progressive political movements. Progressive methodology is notoriously ineffective, but since the power structure within education is maintained by those with firm commitments to this ideology, not much has changed since the book was written. In fact, it's gotten worse, with the social justice movement adding its weight to removing substance from school curricula.
The book is dated in a few ways and if the author had had the results of the most current research, it would have only reinforced his critiques. These include: 1) Learning styles have been thoroughly debunked, 2) discovery learning has been further discredited via cognitive load theory, and 3) the author seemed unaware that the major flaw in Whole Language method of reading instruction is the use of the "Three Cueing Method".
Contrary to some other reviews:
1) The narrator is fine. Any perceived condescension on her part is imaginary.
2) A republic is a form of democracy, so criticizing the author of misusing the word "democracy" is off-base.
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- Nicole
- 07-01-16
A person so versed in cultural literacy should not perpetuate the idea that America is a democracy
We are a republic, --A polity of states. This attempt to equalize the nation under the guise of "democracy" is sinister.
True, rigor and content are essential in education, and we agree that our schools are pitifully impotent on both counts, but! I shiver inside to suppose that a Jeffersonian ideal be enforced by the collective distribution of modern liberal dogma by some un-elected executive branch. No thank you Mr Hirsch...
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3 people found this helpful