The Well-Educated Child: How the Principles and Practices of Quality Thinking, Agency, and Ethical Purpose Cultivate Deeper Learning by Dr. Deborah Kenny

 

Summary (from the publisher): One of America’s leading educators explains what children need to thrive and excel.

In The Well-Educated Child, Dr. Deborah Kenny offers an inspiring vision for education that cultivates intelligent, happy, morally grounded young people. This landmark book will change the way we think about what it means for our children to be well educated.

Drawing on decades of experience with students from preschool through high school, Kenny presents education as soul craft. She reveals how to teach children the skills of self-management and the virtue of self-discipline, and what students must learn to become intellectually curious, knowledgeable, gracious, and motivated.

With wit, wisdom, and warmth, Kenny describes how young people can become serious thinkers and avid readers who appreciate beauty, concentrate for long periods of time on challenging work, and lead meaningful lives. She takes us inside classrooms to understand the importance of deeper learning based on three quality thinking, ethical purpose, and a sense of agency. Her ideas are both practical and deeply philosophical. At a moment when parents and teachers are concerned about digital distraction and declin­ing engagement, The Well-Educated Child is a masterful exposition of what we need to know about what education should be.

Review: Thank you to Zando for a gifted, finished copy of this book.

The author of this book, Dr. Deborah Kenny, is the founder of Harlem Village Academies and the Deeper Learning Institute and has spent years working firsthand with students to explore what works and how to achieve deep and meaningful learning. This book is thus informed by her immense personal experience as an educator. 

As a child of two educators, wife to a third, and as someone who works in public higher education and am a mother of three myself, I was very curious about what Dr. Kenny had to share. This book is extremely readable and very brief. However, she is very vocal about what she doesn't like, to the point where she comes across as self-righteous at times: "We were unified in our disdain for complacency and bureaucracy [...] We could not abide complaining, gossiping, mediocrity, self-centeredness, arrogance, negativity, or divisiveness" (27). 

That being said, I tabbed SO many different sections of this book and loved a lot of what she had to say: 

- "I believe that children need to be avid readers in order to become intellectually sophisticated" (35).

- "Whoever is doing the talking in the classroom is doing the thinking" (47).

- "Students who are well educated are intellectually curious, driven, and self-directed. They are interesting and interested. They recognize and appreciate beauty: the beauty of art, of music, the beauty of math. They are civil in discourse. Well-educated students are independent thinkers who are too savvy to be deceived. They can discern when governments are abusing power and can distinguish between credible information and propaganda. Their reaction when encountering new information is too assume that there's more to the issue in question" (69). 

- She condemns popular teaching strategies like directives, countdowns, beepers, and excessive micromanagement saying, "This is not great teaching. It reduces learning to rote repetition, impedes critical and logical thinking, undermines emotional intelligence, and shapes young minds to value conformity and compliance" (112-113). 

I also love how in favor of the International Baccalaureate she is at teaching self-start learners, as I earned the IB diploma in high school! Conversely, she speaks very negatively about the rote memorization of the Advanced Placement (AP) testing. 

While the author outlines so many wonderful strategies and the ways to achieve them, while reading I kept wondering how useful this book is. Within the typical school in America, what she has done in her Harlem school cannot be replicated, thanks to bureaucracy and state mandated learning standards. Her school is structured as a charter school, and she has a lot more flexibility to enact the practices she wants to see. Also, she herself talks about how many years of 12 hour days it required to get to where she wanted the school to be. Not to mention the rigorous screening process she had for teachers, only selecting the best of the best. This is tragically not attainable for most schools. I do think educators and administrators would benefit from reading this and can certainly implement some of the elements she talks about, but without an entire nationwide overhaul, it's hard to see widespread change on the level she advocates for and has made happen in her school. But certainly food for thought for those who work in education and for parents making decisions about their child's education. 

I did love how much of herself the author infuses into this book, going back to her love of a particular summer camp growing up and how the independent structure of the camp shaped her thinking and describing how she became interested in starting a school after her husband died. At times, this veered a bit much into name dropping of both everyone she's worked with which felt overkill but also of big names that has caught the attention of the school (like John Legend who wrote the forward). 

Stars: 4