I am a former true believer in school, but lost my faith. Yet I'm still teaching in universities, more than three decades on. I have been trying to figure this all out—all the problems, reasons, and solutions—for most of the last twenty years, and since I think by writing, I've written/edited four books about higher education in that time. (I had a prior career as a China anthropologist, which is important to me, but a story for another day.) I also read like a fiend, and on this list, which is a distillation of hundreds and hundreds of books, I have presented a few of my formative favorites.
This book changed my life. It answered my questions about why students so often didn’t like school despite so many efforts to force them to! (Yeah, it sounds dumb to me too, now.)
Since reading this book, I've completely changed the way I teach. Inspired by these insights, I have written several books. I've become courageous about being like Alfie, who is an engaging writer, completely fearless, and committed to human well-being and all the ways our institutions, including schools, contribute to or undermine the best of our spirit—individual and collective.
Even when people in authority challenge me, I am inspired to speak the detailed truth, so much of it learned from this book! (It also has many well-digested sources.)
The basic strategy we use for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way we train the family pet. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research, Alfie Kohn points the way to a more successful strategy based on working with people instead of doing things to them. "Do rewards motivate people?" asks Kohn. "Yes. They motivate people to get rewards." Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished By Rewards presents an…
I love this book because Ivan Illich pulls no punches. I love the way he clearly points out how intertwined schools are with the nature of society, in a feedback loop of influence. Our very souls may be wounded by these structures, even when they are established with good intentions.
This “radical” book gave me permission to understand that I could connect the ecological and pedagogical, the theological and the social, the economic and the affective. Our nature permits endless noncoerced learning, but schools pervert that. Even though I understand how this message can be twisted for purposes of privatization and control, I love the idealism and humanism at its core.
Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting false and misleading notions of 'progress' and development fostered by the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our universities have become recruiting centers for the personnel of the consumer society, certifying citizens for service, while at the same time disposing of those judged unfit for the competitive rat race. In this bold and provocative book, Illich suggest some radical and exciting reforms for the education system.
I love this book because I learn something new each time I open it. And I've opened it hundreds of times.
I love the boundless information here about how human societies, across time and space, have created concepts of the child and childhood, which always intertwine with ideas and practices about learning. Almost nowhere has it ever looked like the familiar-to-us “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic) societies that are usually used to represent “human nature.” In fact, each time I read anything in this book, our own social and cultural practices look stranger and stranger.
This book gives me ideas about the struggles we often have to nurture children and students in our familiar ways—and that's because we are fighting all the natural tendencies of involvement, autonomy, and competence that guide most learning everywhere.
The raising of children, their role in society, and the degree to which family and community is structured around them, varies quite significantly around the world. The Anthropology of Childhood provides the first comprehensive review of the literature on children from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Bringing together key evidence from cultural anthropology, history, and primate studies, it argues that our common understandings about children are narrowly culture-bound. Whereas dominant society views children as precious, innocent and preternaturally cute 'cherubs', Lancy introduces the reader to societies where children are viewed as unwanted, inconvenient 'changelings', or as desired but pragmatically commoditized 'chattels'.…
I love this book because Frank Smith, with the forgettable name, dares to point out the unmentionable: students forget almost everything they learn in school, at least the things they learn through coercion. I love the way he takes on all the orthodoxies about the necessity of teachers and schools, and instead shows the absolutely breathtaking learning that happens through connections with others in meaningful contexts.
I love his use of language learning as an exemplar of how learning works, because we anthropologists know so much about how it really occurs, without direct instruction, and through meaningful interaction with others, and it is so contrary to widely held, erroneous beliefs.
I love books like this, which take on received wisdom, especially when written beautifully and accessibleibly—and in just about a hundred pages.
In this thought-provoking book, Frank Smith explains how schools and educational authorities systematically obstruct the powerful inherent learning abilities of children, creating handicaps that often persist through life. The author eloquently contrasts a false and fabricated "official theory" that learning is work (used to justify the external control of teachers and students through excessive regulation and massive testing) with a correct but officially suppressed "classic view" that learning is a social process that can occur naturally and continually through collaborative activities. This book will be crucial reading in a time when national authorities continue to blame teachers and students for…
I love this book for two reasons: First, Nathan showed (me) how to turn an anthropological eye on our everyday context, revealing its strangeness. And second, my students love this book, which might be all the recommendation you need to hear!
Anthropologists often go “to the field,” but what if “the field” is your actual place of work? And what if that place of work is basically a “total institution,” in Goffman's sense? Then you have to live there. Nathan's year living in dorms and taking classes was modeled on traditional fieldwork, but it's ethically and even logistically complicated in different ways.
As I reread this book every few years, I am reminded that even though I interact with students all the time, there is much about their lives that remains out of reach for me. It's a reminder, all the time, that students are fully embodied, social, emotional beings who sometimes also take classes.
After more than fifteen years of teaching, Rebekah Nathan, a professor of anthropology at a large state university, realized that she no longer understood the behavior and attitudes of her students. Fewer and fewer participated in class discussion, tackled the assigned reading, or came to discuss problems during office hours. And she realized from conversations with her colleagues that they, too, were perplexed: Why were students today so different and so hard to teach? Were they, in fact, more likely to cheat, ruder, and less motivated? Did they care at all about their education, besides their grades?Nathan decided to put…
In Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning, I synthesize nearly two decades of my thinking about school, as a former true believer and as a current critic-practitioner, organized around the central concept of “schoolishness.” These are familiar taken-for-granted structures (I analyze ten of them, such as “time,” “space,” and “schoolish questions”) that produce the alienation that we often deplore. I no longer accept this alienation as inevitable.
The book provides as many alternatives as possible, from others’ work as well as my own experiments and ethnographic investigations, that provide alternatives, promote greater joy, authentic motivation, and experience, and even better learning.
