Inventing Secondary Education: The Rise of the High School in Nineteenth-Century Ontario Book

I gave this three stars because, despite my urges to go find the author and shake him until his ears rang, it was extremely informative and I hard time putting it down. That said, reader beware: the author seems to go into researching this book with the knowledge that Japanese high school students were out-performing Americans in math and science and hoping to find that American schools were in fact "better," despite this statistic.

In my mind, American schools are typically bad at producing what they want: informed thinkers with a passion for democracy and the greater good. On the other hand, Japanese schools are excellent at producing what they want: adults who are going to go out into the world and serve their purpose. The rub lies in the fact that Americans think that the Japanese crush their childrens' souls in the process and the Japanese laugh at what some of our high schools call "math."

My original intent was to shake the author into a coma, but he mostly redeemed himself with this line, near the end of the book: "If the Japanese suffer from too much standardization and routine, American high schools suffer from lack of focus."

Of course, then his appendix dips into comparing suicide rates with the flux of the school year, so...