The End of the Rainbow
An accessible and hopeful book that will be illuminating “to even the staunchest supporters of standardized testing” (Publishers Weekly)
“In this startlingly timely book on education in the United States, Susan Engel critiques the current monetized version of ‘return on investment’ and challenges us to focus on the right returns from the right investments.” —Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed
Amid the hype of Race to the Top, online experiments such as Khan Academy, and bestselling books like The Sandbox Investment, we seem to have drawn a line that leads from nursery school along a purely economic route, with money as the final stop. But what price do we all pay for the increasingly singular focus on wage as the outcome of education? Susan Engel, a leading psychologist and educator, argues that this economic framework has had a profound impact not only on the way we think about education but also on what happens inside school buildings
The End of the Rainbow asks what would happen if we changed the implicit goal of education and imagines how different things would be if we made happiness, rather than money, the graduation prize. Drawing on psychology, education theory, and a broad range of classroom experiences across the country, Engel offers a fascinating alternative view of what education might become: teaching children to read books for pleasure and self-expansion and encouraging collaboration. All of these new skills, she argues, would not only cultivate future success in the world of work but also would make society as a whole a better, happier place.
Accessible to parents and teachers alike, The End of the Rainbow will be the beginning of a new, more vibrant public conversation about what the future of American education should look like.
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