Books

ED SCHOOL FOLLIES: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, by Rita Kramer. (Free Press, $22.95.) Early in her visits to education schools around the country, Kramer listens to prospective teachers at Columbia University invoke caring, sharing, and compassion as their raison d'tre. One woman even asserts that she plans "to teach peace.'' Such high-mindedness, it becomes apparent, is characteristic of both elite and undistinguished institutions; teachers, we learn, are trained less as purveyors of knowledge than as social workers-cumtherapists who "facilitate'' creative thinking. Professors, believing that teachers should be guides rather than authority figures, frequently divide their classes into small groups where people "share'' their feelings about teaching. This cooperative model, which is to be duplicated in elementary and secondary schools, turns the classroom into a kind of sensitivity workshop in which the teachers' primary goal is to foster social interaction and self-esteem. Because criticism can be damaging to a child's self-esteem, teachers are commonly encouraged to reward effort and participation rather than achievement, even disregarding tests with too many failures. The problem with this emphasis on well-being, Kramer argues, is that it promotes feeling over learning; while we worry about "life adjustment,'' Japanese and European students gain mastery over difficult subjects. And while education schools continually talk about higherthinking skills, Kramer wryly points out that few of their students have anything to think about, their own educations having left them illequipped in the "content'' areas. Finally, Ed School Follies is an attack on a teacher-training system that confounds idealism with naivet, imagining that it must transform lives when teaching...