Giving up on School : Student Dropouts and Teacher Burnouts

The authors discuss how educational alienation is created and fostered by factors in the school, the community and the world. They attack some contemporary school reforms for addressing the wrong problems and propose their own solutions to minimizing alienation.

Students don′t just drop out of school, they dump it. Teachers don′t just quit, they bolt. Both are victims of the alienation process that prevails in schools -- and is cultivated by the conditions within the school, the community, and society at large. The search for a solution to these conditions is hardly new, but nearly all attempts have failed. Giving Up on School provides educators with the insight they need to know why previous "solu-tions" solved nothing because reformers have approached the situation as two distinct problems. The root causes are the same in each and "mandate an immediate and drastic reappraisal." Giving Up on School is the culmination of years of sociologi-cal and anthropological research in school settings. The authors offer a compelling portrait of those who "turn off, tune out, and drop out" and then propose changes -- both modest and not-so-modest -- to reverse the trend.