Response to Crompton review by Leonard Waks

Abstract

I want to thank Dr. Helen Crompton for her review, and the editor of Other Education for inviting me to reply. Crompton agrees that our current educational arrangements are in need of fresh thinking, and finds my account of the evolution of the American schools and their current predicaments useful. She says that American education is full of contradictions, but claims that my proposals are too. While she doesn’t actually identify specific “contradictions,†she does offer a number of harsh criticisms, and I want to focus on the most important of these.

An important complaint of Crompton throughout her essay is that my account is America-centric. My book, however, is about American high schools...