Amid the hype of Race to the Top, online experiments such as Khan
Academy, and bestselling books like The Sandbox Investment, we seem to
have drawn a line that leads from nursery school along a purely economic
route, with money as the final stop. But what price do we all pay for
the singular focus on wage as the outcome of education? Susan Engel, a
leading psychologist and educator, argues that this economic framework
has had a profound impact not only on the way we think about education
but also on what happens inside school buildings.
The End of the Rainbow asks what would happen if we changed the
implicit goal of education and imagines how different things would be if
we made happiness, rather than money, the graduation prize. In this "gem
of a book" (Deborah Meier), Engel offers a fascinating alternative view
of what education might become: teaching children to read books for
pleasure and self-expansion and encouraging collaboration. All of these
new skills, she argues, would not only cultivate future success in the
world of work but would also make society as a whole a happier place.