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"What is wrong with our schools?" is the question everyone seems to be asking, or more like screaming nowadays. Standard answers point to everything from school funding to unions to bureaucracies and more. In this book, Daniel Buck provides a different answer: flawed ideas - ideas about instruction, curriculum, even human nature itself - are the root cause of American schooling's dysfunction.
Touching on philosophy, contemporary educational studies, cognitive science, and his own experience in the classroom, Buck argues that so long as we build our system on incorrect first principles, all other reforms are for naught. In place of the progressive education that pervades our schools, Buck argues for a traditionalist approach - classic literature, direct instruction, sequenced curricula, clear rules and consequences - as the education we need for the future.
— Doug Lemov, author, Teach Like a Champion
I have followed Daniel Buck's work for years. He is emerging as an indispensable and engaging voice on education. If he writes with more authority than most, it's because his views were formed not in an ivory tower, but as a classroom teacher who takes seriously his responsibility to other people's children. What is Wrong With Our Schools? will bring his insights to the broader audience he richly deserves.
— Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute
There's plenty in this smart, hard-hitting book to make anyone feel pessimistic about the state of American education. But optimism is still in order, because Buck has picked up the mantle of traditionalism for a new generation.
— Michael Petrilli, president, Thomas B. Fordham Institute