Goyal's 'Schools on Trial': Bumpy but challenging argument to rethink education

Schools on Trial

How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice

By Nikhil Goyal. Doubleday. 309 pp. $26.95 nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by

Glenn C. Altschuler

nolead ends At age 20, Nikhil Goyal is a self-proclaimed "bug in the system." A critic of compulsory schooling, Goyal is now an undergraduate at Goddard College and a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the Nation, and on MSNBC and Fox.

In Schools on Trial, Goyal blasts schools as enemies of "creativity, curiosity and zeal" whose primary purpose is controlling and commanding children. He rejects traditional U.S. education - grades, tests ("drill, kill, and bubble-fill"), rote learning, deference to authority, age segregation, and homework. He maintains that unstructured, unsupervised "play" can - and has - produced happy, curious, passionate, and successful self-directed learners.

Goyal's thesis is, in essence, a reprise (and an updating) of the radical indictment of schools made by Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Holt, Jonathan Kozol, and others in the 1960s and '70s. Like them, Goyal compares compulsory school laws to slavery and involuntary servitude and argues that pedagogy was designed to serve the economic and political interests of the wealthy (who wanted a population of docile followers, not independent thinkers). Like them, Goyal shines a light on progressive schools dedicated to the proposition that students are "natural learners."

Goyal is unlikely to persuade readers to initiate "a goddam revolution." He exaggerates the pervasiveness of rote memorization, lectures, and passive teacher-directed instruction in "traditional" American schools. Nor are opponents of the "Common Core" likely to agree that "we don't need tests." As Goyal acknowledges, moreover, the "selection bias" (the preponderance of children from affluent families) makes it difficult to generalize about the potential of 21st-century progressive schools (where project-based, experiential learning occurs with the consent of students) to act as "catalysts in a learning revolution."

Stronger is his argument that youngsters can benefit from less structure and more play, in and out of school. He cites studies finding that a dearth of play disrupts brain development. Children use more advanced vocabulary during play than at other activities, and self-directed play in loosely structured, socially supportive settings fosters emotional and intellectual development.

And Goyal offers a comprehensive - and mostly persuasive - critique of "corporatized" charter schools. Their successes, especially for students with the greatest needs, evaporate on closer examination, he points out, drawing on the superb work of Diane Ravitch. And charter schools divert attention from the fundamental challenges (and meager resources) of public schools.

Schools on Trial is, indeed, "a bumpy ride," but Goyal may accomplish his goal: to make students and parents uncomfortable, to challenge them, to make them skeptical about many things they "thought to be true about schooling, education, and learning."

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American studies at Cornell University.