“Our bottom line? Our nation continues to plod away with incremental fixes to an obsolete education system, as innovation races ahead.”

When I lived in Tanzania, I used to visit a primary school where the children were taught by having them all stand and recite things aloud. Learning by rote used to be common everywhere, and still is in much of the world. The idea that students should be engaged and think critically, and not just some students but all students, remains a new and powerful one.

Wagner and Dintersmith argue that even where kids no longer chant in unison, we haven’t cracked it; that students are spending too much time on rote learning, and not enough on really learning how to innovate. Children are taught to name the parts of the car, in other words, rather than how to actually drive. Likely to Succeed places the blame on standardized testing and the drive to prepare kids for college instead of teach them.

Standardized tests certainly have disadvantages as well as advantages, but it seems extreme to place the blame for the poor results of the American educational system entirely on them. The authors have a strong ideological position, and there is some support for it, but claiming as they do that standardized testing is the single largest threat to national security feels a bit much. They also occasionally misuse statistics, such as when they discuss the returns to getting a university education. There’s an important question over whether university teaches valuable information or just adds a signal without teaching much, but the statistics are fairly clear the returns to going are large.

Most Likely to Succeed has some solid ideas, and readers may find themselves nodding their heads as they go along – I liked their point that allowing students to use computers in exams might actually makes more sense if students are to learn to problem solve with technology – but for me the book struggles because it isn’t adding much to the debate. Everyone agrees we should teach students to think critically, and that we don’t just want to create low level thinkers. In some, egregious, cases, how to fix that is clear, but in most it is not: to learn how to do math, some evidence suggests rote learning is an important first step. The book doesn’t really provide answers on how to resolve the hard questions, or where to go next, other than that we should be teaching students high level skills somehow. I suspect education is also not as monolithic as the authors suggest: I didn’t go to an American school, but my impression is that the variance between them is extremely wide. For that reason, I found something like College Disrupted, which accounts for this variance and uses data to explain how education should change, more satisfying.

You can see more reviews (and get your own copy) here: Most Likely to Succeed.