The most recommended education books

I have always enjoyed poetry and this book introduces simple couplets to children while telling a sweet story of loving Asian parents who welcome a new child. Geared to very young children, the artwork can tell the story without someone reading it to them, but the lyrical words just add to the beauty of the message. 

Here is another game-changing book that is a few decades old, but has spanned a worldwide movement in the knowledge, research, and growth of self-directed education. This book addresses how children learn everything they need to know through self-directed play, projects, and exploration for grades 1 to 12. It also shows the damaging effects of institutional school, bullying, and how direct teaching can stop a child’s curiosity and creativity needed for 20th-century careers. Children do not need school to learn. Learning is everywhere, anytime, and is available to everyone.

In this book, a little girl named Sarah is worried about starting her first day at school. She can’t help but imagine all the terrible things that could happen. Her friend named Benny helps her to change her perspective by showing her all the things that could go right instead of wrong. I really enjoy this book because it’s so easy to let our minds wander to the negative possibilities. I like how this book reminds us to see the good that can happen in situations and also encourages us to find good positive friends like Benny that will help give us a boost when needed! 

I recommend this collection of articles because it gives a readable and clear view of the connection of the benefits of education to education finance and brings in for the first time the distribution of both the benefits and the costs of education.

Kern Alexander is well known as the father of equity as it relates to education and education finance. His article on the “Concept of Equity in School Finance” which is Chapter 10 in his book sets the stage for 9 additional articles that follow on essentially all of the key aspects of distribution of the benefits among children and families and of costs among families and taxpayers. 

This follows the nine Chapters on economic efficiency in education, which explore in greater depth many of the aspects already introduced above. These include the “Human Capital Approach” by Theodore W. Schultz, “The Social and Economic Externalities of Education”, “The… show more.

Benjamin’s Half in Shadow is an excellent exploration of the life of Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006), a pioneering scholar of black women’s literature. Fearing it could damage her career in the academy, McKay declined to be caricatured as an older, divorced, black single mother of two children. So, she hid this from all her academic colleagues and friends, including her closest ones. The driving force of Benjamin’s book is trying to make sense of the private life and professional motivations of McKay’s choice to live her life “half in shadow.” Benjamin suggests that black women in the academy face similar pressures to achieve in and conform to predominantly white spaces in ways that do not easily allow them to bring their entire selves into the light.

Ron Berger is a global treasure in the field of education. He is the guiding spirit behind the remarkable EL Education schools – they used to be called Expeditionary Learning schools – in the USA. An Ethic of Excellence was the first book of Ron’s I encountered, and it blew me away. With years of hard-won experience, he has learned that all students, give the right kind of support, are capable of producing genuinely high-quality work, and he knows how to teach in a way that makes that possibility a reality. Ron says, “when we are grown up, we won’t be judged by our test scores, but by the quality of both our character and our work”, and he gets students ready for that world. His schools get all their students to good colleges, and they get good degrees. The quality of Ron’s work is truly inspiring.

This book was a real favourite when my children were small, and like all favourite books, I probably read it about a million times. It’s a simple story about two brothers baking bread. The children loved the rhythm of the text, the repeated refrain, and the gentle ‘twist’ at the end. Like some of my other book picks, this one has facts at the back: this time about different types of bread from around the world. There’s also a recipe. Did we ever bake Zed’s bread? Of course we did! It was delicious.

Of the small subgenre books that deal with the way games aid education, Toppo's shows how games can make a difference in the way students learn by looking at first at a Washington, D.C. school's success with improving math scores through game playing. From there, he visits professors and visionaries, all of whom have helped kids learn through games. One thing becomes clear: if there were a games class in every school, especially in underserved communities, student grades would go up.

The Sane Positivist, by Geraldine Jonçich Clifford (née Jonçich), an expansive, out-of-print volume from 1968, was our favorite discovery from my book's research phase. Written in a stylish, old-fashioned present tense, the book is a biography of E. L. Thorndike, a figure who can credibly claim as much influence over the US’s (and much of the world’s) educational path as any other single human being. Even if E. L. Thorndike weren’t an educationist of historic significance, he would still belong in the animal behavior research pantheon, thanks to his immensely important work cataloguing the learning powers of animals (usually, cats he observed escaping from cages).

The author documents this early work and Thorndike’s subsequent leap (which I consider misguided) from animals in cages to humans in classrooms, while giving a deeply sourced and keenly observed account of his personal development. The figure she describes is as complex as… show more.

This nonfiction book is not only dear to my heart, I can also honestly say it changed my life.

It’s about the only Federal Emergency School ever created. Built for the children of farm workers displaced by the Dust Bowl in 1940, it tells of School Superintendent Leo B. Hart’s ingenuity and steadfast devotion to children who faced seemingly insurmountable hardships and discrimination as occupants of the migrant camp outside Bakersfield, California that inspired John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

I taught at this school, now known as Sunset, for many years, and I kept a note in my lesson planner that read What would Leo B. Hart do?