Sound And Fury

THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards," by Alfie Kohn. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) In his influential 1996 book, The Schools Our Children Need , cultural-literacy trailblazer E.D. Hirsch urged educators to reclaim American classrooms from the anything-goes progressivism that, in his mind, had poisoned our educational waters. Schools, he asserted, were turning out graduates so poorly educated—so devoid of the common knowledge that binds society—that our national identity was in jeopardy. Now, in The Schools Our Children Deserve , cultural-literacy archenemy Kohn offers an angry rebuttal, arguing that it isn't progressivism that has polluted our schools but rather the reigning "bunch o' facts" orthodoxy promoted by traditionalist zealots like Hirsch.

Certainly both writers exaggerate. While our classrooms are not exactly frontiers of open inquiry and constructivist pursuits, they also are not, with inevitable exceptions, the little hellholes of "drill and kill" that Kohn would have us believe. These days, even the dreary traditional schools Kohn keeps griping about employ a number of his beloved methods, such as cooperative learning and real-world problem-solving.

At some level, Kohn must know this or he wouldn't assert, as he does, that American schools are not nearly as bad as commonly perceived—a curious claim in light of his insistence that most are defined by worksheets and rote memorization. But, then, Kohn seems less interested in being accurate than in scoring points against his opponents—most notably the purveyors of academic...