What is School For? Book Review Section 1-24

What is School For? By Seth Godin Sections 1-24

I begun to read Stop Stealing Dreams: What is School For? For my Learning and Technology class.  This book was recommended to challenge my perspective on schooling.  This book is written as a manifesto. If you would like a free copy do to http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf 

I would highly recommend to parents, teachers and administrators to read.

So far I am enjoying this reading.  Godin is doing a good job of convincing me of the problems of public education.  Although, I was pretty convinced prior to this reading his examples have helped me solidify my understanding of the real problems we are having with public schools.   Godwin presents questions throughout his manifesto, this helps the reader to explore their own situation and formulate their own opinions.

This book has been sectioned off into sections, written similar to blog posts and a stream of Godin’s thoughts.  This post I will reflect on sections 1-24.  The main message of this book is all summed up in the title, what is school for?  Why was school created? And how it has evolved over time the main point Godin was addressing.  When the common school was created by Mann it’s purpose was to educate children to work in factories, however our economy has changed and longer are these the jobs our children will have, but school has not changed enough to reflect this change in the job market.  Before education was not developed to motivate kids, it was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. 

A question raised in Section 4 is “What is school for” and proposes four things. One particularly interesting to me was “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” I found this interesting because I currently work at a Montessori charter school and we have many parents that have moved their children to our school from public school because their children didn’t love school and it wasn’t working for various reasons.  However, I found many of my parents saying that their child love coming to school now.  I wonder if this has to do with the Montessori philosophy and following the child and a course that each child has choice.  Very rarely are there whole class lessons and everyone is working on something different.  In a Montessori environment we are encouraging this love of learning and not churning out students to work as obedient factory workers.  More and more Montessori schools are popping up and it may be in response to this standardized public school education.

Which leads me to my next point in section 17 about reinventing school.  I was reflecting on the major points that Godin discusses about how school can be rethought.  This is his list:

1.     Homework during the day, lectures at night

2.     Open book, open note, all the time

3.     Access to any course, anywhere in the world


4.     Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction

5.     The end of multiple-choice exams

6.     Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement

7.     The end of compliance as an outcome

8.     Cooperation instead of isolation


9.     Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas.

10. Transformation of the role of the teacher

11. Lifelong learning, earlier work

12. Death of the nearly famous college

I thought about my school and our curriculum and how we are doing many of these items already.  We are not giving homework, we are not test driven, the only test we do a few reading and math assessments and state standardized test, but we are not administering chapter or benchmark tests.  We have focused instruction instead of mass generalized instruction (big time!)  Since we are not test-driven we are more concerned with experience and a love of learning.  Lastly, transforming the role of the teacher, I do not lecture and I am not the source of the information.  I am a guide for my students and assist in helping them find the answer and to seek out learning and information.  Although we follow the Montessori philosophy we are still have to adhere to Common Core and state standardized tests since we are a publically funded.  Because of this we still need to reinvent public school.