Romances with Schools : A Life of Education - Hardcover

"The one-size-fits-all school that took its present shape in the 1930s was a poor fit with reality even then. In the twenty-first century, it belongs in our romantic memories of once upon a time." --John I. Goodlad

John I. Goodlad has been an unflagging voice for humanistic ideals in education for more than four decades and has helped reframe the modern discourse on the role and function of schools. For Goodlad, the goal of public education is to help children become free and full participants in a democratic society by instilling them with a love of learning and a sense of civic responsibility--goals that are incompatible with our present system of schooling that teaches to standardized tests.

In Romances with Schools, John Goodlad steps out from behind the public persona of distinguished scholar and advocate for public schooling to offer a moving personal account of a life devoted to educating the young. He deftly interweaves fascinating personal details with reflections on many of the larger issues in education that he has explored throughout his career.

John's early encounters with formal schooling begin just before the Great Depression in Canada with the humble North Star School. From there we are taken through sixty-plus years in education, starting with John's first teaching job as the sole instructor of a one-room schoolhouse in a farming community in British Columbia, through his years as an education activist and founder of the famed Englewood Project, to his decision in the 1980s to step down as Dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education to return to his first love, teaching. Along the way, he treats us to vivid characterizations of the men, women, and above all, the children who shaped him as a person and inspired his thinking on education. And he explores important themes at the center of his philosophy, such as the pernicious influence of tracking and standardized testing and the need for perpetual re-evaluation and renewal in pedagogy.

Offering a compelling view of public education in North America as seen through the prism of one extraordinary person's life, Romances with Schools is both a poignant memoir and what may be John Goodlad's most persuasive argument yet for the need to change public education to fit the demands of a free society.

"Much of higher learning for its own sake has been replaced by the pre-vocational and pre-professional, after which there is scarcely any. The lower schools have become farm clubs, with their test scores determining where in the hierarchy of academic institutions they will play ball.

The test scores correlate hardly at all with the noble and virtuous traits embedded in the rhetoric of school purpose we consistently espouse. The time has long been with us for setting aside a period of several years solely for cultivating the sensitivities and sensibilities, the sense of self-respect and worthiness, and the civil and civic dispositions required of citizens in a free and just society. I would set aside the years from four to sixteen, now of little economic value beyond consumerism, for the necessary educating and make them off limits to all else. Given our espoused worship of higher learning, now given over largely to vocationalism and credentialing, this may look like the long way around to ensuring the social and political democracy that is our most vital work in progress. I am confident, however, that beginning with the young is not just the shortest but the only way to this end. I would then leave to the graduates of this educational apprenticeship the wise honing of the later years."

--from Romances with Schools

John I. Goodlad, PhD is President of the Institute for Educational Inquiry in Seattle and author of A Place Called School, the groundbreaking study of the effectiveness of the American system of schooling. A leading force in improving public schooling in North America, he developed and directed the Englewood Project, an experiment in nongraded schooling on the elementary level, and served as Dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Education for sixteen years.