The Education Enigma

The USA is reported to have 50 million functional illiterates. How could this possibly happen? SAT scores continue to decline, despite ever more massive spending. How can this be? To study American education is to be confronted by what Bruce Price calls "the education enigma." He has written more than 250 articles trying to explain the mysteries of an educational system that never seems truly committed to education. Here he has assembled the best parts from all these essays to create a unique and lively collection of short pieces. Price writes clearly and decisively. He explains history, ideology, dogma and deception. He makes many recommendations for how we can improve in the future. Bruce Price--author, artist, education activist--is your ideal guide to the dark side of American education. The web address of each article is provided so that readers can find the original piece. UPDATE JUNE, 2015: the price was just reduced to $8.75. The book is several years old. Some of the web addresses are not active. And a new collection might be published next year. However, this book remains an excellent introduction to the problems in K-12. Please order it and pass it around to as many people as possible. When a book is short like this, people tend to read the whole thing quickly. A few months ago an education reformer in Canada sent an email saying that she had bought the book years ago and thought it was "brilliant."