by Lisa Delpit is a great book. I only read a couple of chapters but it’s one of those books that makes you really think. It’s along the line of the experience I had reading E.D. Hirsch, hearing another angle, when you feel like all you’ve been hearing is one side of a story. In this case it’s the “progressive” side.

What Hirsch and Delpit agree on is a sound rationale for why progressive education can actually prevent kids of color and low SES from succeeding academically. It doesn’t meet their needs. They argue for more traditional teaching strategies. I don’t agree with Hirsch about teaching the classical, Eurocentric canon however. Delpit pointed out that the whole language reading program the schools were using at the time, was not used by Black teachers. In their opinions, their kids needed to develop the technical side of writing, not fluency. They needed to learn how to write to get into colleges and realistically compete on the job market.