Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsDeluded, shallow & badly written
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2011
Reading Frank Furedi's Wasted: Why education isn't educating feels a lot like being cornered by a mildly sozzled Telegraph reader at a party to which you wish, in retrospect, you hadn't gone. He hasn't really got much to say, and proceeds to say it at great length - much of it via rambling, repetitive stream of consciousness. Arguably (just arguably) this book might have made a half-interesting pamphlet - but it seems to have lacked an editor: it's full of non sequiturs, contradictions and silly unfounded assertions. That Furedi is a Professor of anything and writes quite so badly is an indictment of the education industry in the UK. And that a book this baggy makes the shelves, no less an indictment of the publishing industry.
His complaint - that schools trade in trendy therapeutic feel-good nonsense at the expense of "the canon" is not new. It suffers from a threefold problem that makes it as pointless now as it was when masquerading as the Great Books theory or as Back to Basics or as Harold Bloom. First: what body of work constitutes the "canon"? Second: presuming that could be decided (by whom, on what grounds, and in what fields?), given the canon's magnitude, how could the time be found to develop the curriculum massive enough to deliver it? Third: supposing the time has been found and the curriculum written, how would you oblige students to 'learn' it?
The truth that (repeatedly) escapes Furedi is the most basic tenet of education - people learn what they are interested in and what has resonance and meaning for them. That's it - if you can't pay attention, you won't learn. This doesn't change as you get older, though perhaps we get more skilled at recognising ulterior motives ("this is boring, but it'll get me promoted"), and so can marshal interest from more diverse sources. However, the notion of the transmission theory of learning - that kids will quietly sit and absorb their teachers' wisdom, and which Furedi confuses with Arendt's concern that education should (indeed, cannot help but) address its role as an agent of cultural transmission, is a fantasy.
John Holt has a simple definition of education - it's whatever allows one to understand better how the world works and to do more things to one's own satisfaction within it. Given the nature of the human psyche, there is an implicit ethical dimension to this definition, as satisfaction will be tied up with self-estimation - and, with this in mind, the ideal school will be the one that supports a young person in becoming more intellectually and materially effective, by the lights of their developing moral awareness. and with an eye to the consequences of their thoughts and actions. There's nothing in such a project that demands ignorance of or ignoring the lessons of the past, quite the contrary - and why Furedi should repeatedly insist otherwise is a mystery.