W5H Book Club

This month, Luki and Dave break down the much ballyhooed Singapore education system. Is it the world renowned educational beast that it purports to be? Or is it something more sinister?

This month, W5H reconvenes to discuss The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada's Schools, by Paul W. Bennett. The book is a critical look at the state of public education in Canada, with discussions on topics as wide ranging as French Immersion and busing. What does the W5H think about education in their home country? Are we just a country of complainers when it comes to government progr...

This month, W5H breaks down In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to Worldclass Schools by Pasi Sahlberg and Timothy Walker. Did you know that Finland has one of the world's pre-eminent education systems? What is it that makes it so strong and why does it work? Luki and Dave endeavour to find out and see if that success replicable in North America.

This week, the W5H Book Club looks at Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. While the western world looks on in awe at China's performance on international standardized tests, Yong Zhao shows us why the Chinese themselves are actively trying to reform their own system and why it would be a mistake for the west to try to c...

W5H dives into Slaying Goliath by Diane Ravitch, a close examination of the failures of the charter school system in the United States, and exposes the realities behind the education reforms of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Music: Play it Again by Christopher Norton, performed by Victoria Hsu

This week, W5H takes a look at Limitless Mind by Jo Boaler, a mathematics educator and professor at Stanford University who wants people to overhaul the way mathematics is taught and learned, by pushing people towards a growth mindset and overturning many traditionally held beliefs about math and education. Music: Play it Again by Christopher Norton, performed by Victoria Hsu

Luki and Dave discuss John Taylor Gatto's angry polemic "Weapons of Mass Instruction" and his theory that schools exist to help propagate an elite class that profits off the students that it trains to become consumption-happy conformists. In the process, he argues that many impressive people did not require formal education, challenges the orthodoxy of sending our kids to school, and invites us to...