Thoughts on Lives on the Boundary

I finished Mike Rose's Lives on the Boundary last night on the flight back to LR.  It was extremely well written, and a very enjoyable read.  It never dragged nor did it ever get preachy, due at least in part to the way he interlaces his philosophy on education with anecdotes and personal history. 

Although there is a portion at the end of the book that has been updated, the book itself was originally published in the early 1980s.  I was surprised to realize this about 3/4 of the way through the book, because it still feels very relevant.  In fact, it may be even more so now, as the education system in the country places even greater emphasis on testing and scores than it did when the book was originally written.

Rose makes several conclusions in his book based on his own history (he was labeled a slow learner at one point due to a mix up in test scores) and his experiences in the classroom.  He doesn't believe that students are required to have the foundations of the English language mastered before they begin writing.  He doesn't believe that the typical methods of learning that occur in high school and earlier successfully prepare students for the critical thinking expected at higher levels of education.  But perhaps most importantly, he believes that illiteracy is very frequently not a problem of intelligence at all, but instead a problem of access.  Not necessarily access to the written word itself, but access to the traditional thought processes that are used to define literacy.  Those processes being, for example, the ability to answer questions correctly on certain types of tests, or the ability to write grammatically correct sentences.

His anecdotes discuss individuals who have been designated slow learners, remedial, or given various other labels often used to define those who don't quite 'get it' as easily as the rest of the class.  Rose shows that for many of these individuals, once you address the true underlying problem, you begin to see that intelligence is not the real issue.  Rather, a lack of background, foundation, or a simple misunderstanding of the rules of how the game is played are often more to blame for the labels these individuals are given.

I'm guessing that this book, when published, probably didn't buy him a lot of friends in the education field.  He challenges many assumptions and traditions that have shaped our current education system.  I think the section I most enjoyed revolved around higher eduction and the traditional college or university.  His discussion about the tension between a college's need for enrollment numbers (read: increased tuition) versus that same college's need to keep its focus on higher education (read: maintain the academic elite) underscores some vitally important - and controversial - questions about higher education:  should higher education be available to everyone?  If not, to whom should it be available?  What percentage of our population do we want to attain higher education? 

Of course, there are many other topics he covers in the book, and I will probably come back to some of them, but I wanted to get these thoughts down while they were still fresh.