Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do about It

  • By: Ronald A. Wolk
  • Narrated by: T. Travis
  • Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do about It cover art

Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do about It

By: Ronald A. Wolk
Narrated by: T. Travis
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.99

Buy Now for £13.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Finnish Lessons 3.0 (Third Edition) cover art
The New Education cover art
Revolution in Higher Education cover art
I Love Learning; I Hate School cover art
Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division cover art
The World Becomes What We Teach cover art
Crimes of the Educators cover art
Professionalizing Leadership cover art
Race to the Bottom cover art
Failure to Disrupt cover art
The School Revolution cover art
Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners, and Experts with Something to Teach cover art
The Teacher Gap cover art
Ungrading cover art
What School Could Be cover art
In Teachers We Trust cover art

Summary

Why has successful school reform been so difficult to achieve, despite decades of well-intentioned efforts, endless rhetoric, and billions of dollars of investment? Why do most U.S. schools continue to produce disappointing results? Why is there such a disconnect between the schools we need and the schools we have?

In this thoughtful and insightful book, Ronald A. Wolk tackles these questions head-on, identifying key assumptions that have shaped the debate on school reform for the past several decades, including the emphasis on standards and testing, calls for a longer school day and year, the push to enroll more students in advanced math classes, and the quest to place a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. Backed by research and other evidence, he points out the flaws in each assumption, and then proposes alternative assumptions as the basis for new, innovative schools that would emphasize such elements as

  • Individualized instruction, with various pathways for learning;
  • Real-world contexts for learning;
  • Performance assessment;
  • A restructuring of public education to expand preschool; and
  • Transformation of the teachers' role from instructor to advisor.
Acknowledging that the current system is too entrenched to accept radical reform, Wolk suggests incorporating his assumptions into a separate, parallel strategy for new schools. The result is a provocative proposal for teachers, administrators, policymakers, parents, and others to consider as they contemplate the future of public education in the United States.

The book is published by ASCD.

©2011 ASCD (P)2012 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“In the trench warfare surrounding school improvement that has raged for decades, Ron Wolk has worked as an embedded journalist who communicated to the rest of us how progress was lost and won. Reading Wasting Minds is like sitting at the feet of the sage of the movement as he separates the false from the true. The perspective he gives is invaluable.” (Professor Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business School and author of Disrupting Class and The Innovator's Dilemma)
“This book challenges the sacred cows of public education and seeks to change the way we think about schools. Ron Wolk offers logical, common-sense answers to the enormous educational problems facing us. Those responsible for finding solutions should pay close attention to what he says.” (Stanley Goldstein, founder and former CEO and Chairman of CVS Caremark Corporation)

More from the same

What listeners say about Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System Is Failing and What We Can Do about It

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.