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Editorial Review Product Description
"We shape our tools and then they shape us." With these words, Kenneth Boulding captured one of the great truths of the modern world. In Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips, Gene V Glass analyzes how a few key technological inventions changed culture in America and how public education has changed as a result. Driving these changes are material self-interest and the desire for comfort and security, both of which have transformed American culture into a hyper-consuming, xenophobic society that is systematically degrading public education.
Glass shows how the central education policy debates at the start of the 21st century (vouchers, charter schools, tax credits, high-stakes testing, bilingual education) are actually about two underlying issues: how can the costs of public education be cut, and how can the education of the White middle-class be "quasi-privatized" at public expense? Working from the demographic realities of the past thirty years, he projects a challenging and disturbing future for public education in America. ... Read more Customer Reviews (12) 
Interesting book on reform
I purchased this text for a grad class.It is an interesting take on educational reform. It's an interesting read and worth the time for anyone interested in the history of school reform.
Every parent should read it
This is a clear, concise analysis of the over-use and over-emphasis of testing in U.S. schools. The author presents clear analysis of the statistical and historical background of how we got where we are now. And it's a clear warning to parents, policy-makers, and educators about where we are going. This whole mess was started because of a "race to the top" of international test results, but the nature of high-stakes testing has perverted curriculum to the point of no return. We have to fight to renew our educational system...or else!
I'm a parent of two boys who have been subjected to these tests and the narrowed curriculum that they encourage. I feel like I've committed academic abuse. I fight every day to complement schooling with REAL learning so they can love learning the way I do.
Every parent should read this book and tell other parents about it. Not until parents rise up will our educational system change...
I Never Looked at it This Way Before
Glass has drawn a very convincing and somewhat disturbing picture of what the future of public education in this country (the US) is going to look like. I was skeptical at first but the data and the way they were interpreted convinced me. We are headed for a divided society in this country if something doesn't happen soon to unite us.
A Wake-up Call for Anyone who Cares About Public Education
This book is a real eye-opener. It examines the forces changing public institutions of all kinds in America in the first few decades of the 21st Century. What I like about it is that the author refuses to give a bunch of glib answers for the problems public schools will increasingly face. 5 Stars!
Very Interesting but Flawed
"Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips" is one of the most interesting books I've read on U.S. education in a long time- and I've read several dozen over the past few years. Dr. Glass mentions in the book that he got inspiration from Jared Diamond's excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which looked at the impact of technology in shaping civilizations throughout human history. Dr. Glass makes the argument that the inventions of artificial fertilizers, contraceptives and life-extending medications, industrial robots, and the personal credit card have led to huge changes in American society during the 20th century. As a result of these demographic changes, Dr. Glass argues that the older, whiter voting public has abandoned its support for government-run schools that educate "other peoples' children".
The book is strongest in Part II, the chapters devoted to tracing the impact of technology in changing U.S. demographics. I found this section to be fascinating and very thought-provoking. If it were possible to rate each portion of the book separately, this part deserves 5 stars.
Where I found Dr. Glass' arguments to be flawed, however, was in his treatment of the state of government-run education. He unconvincingly repeats all the tired old liberal claims about the topic. In his view, the crisis in the schools has been "manufactured" for political reasons in order to destroy government-run schools. He devotes much space in the book to diatribes against standardized testing, charter schools, vouchers and tax credits for private schools, homeschooling, cyberschools, open enrollment and other school choice programs, alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America, and so on.
Even though the book has a copyright date of 2008, Dr. Glass often uses older studies to support his positions while ignoring more recent studies that would undermine them. For example, he uses a small 1998 study to make the claim that homeschoolers are 94% non-Hispanic whites, 1% blacks, and <1% Hispanics. Why did he ignore the much larger 2003 National Center for Educational Statistics survey that found homeschoolers to be 77% non-Hispanic whites, 9% blacks, and 5% Hispanics? The latter numbers are a lot closer to the overall school-age population, which in 2003 was 61% non-Hispanic whites, 15% blacks, and 17% Hispanics. Yes, blacks and Hispanics are somewhat underrepresented among homeschoolers but it's not even remotely as much as Dr. Glass would have his readers believe. Dr. Glass similarly cherry-picks his data on many other "hot button" educational issues.
Dr. Glass also has a highly annoying tendency to make accusations of racism/xenophobia without providing any objective evidence that it truly is at work. He admits as much in his appendix, where he states that his "personal preference is for psychoanalysis to explain many of the most important aspects of human behavior...I see something akin to the 'defense mechanisms' at work in the intellectualizing of motives of both experts and ordinary people around questions of racial and ethnic segregation in public education. No one likes to be accused of being prejudiced, but most of us are." Conjectures like this do not belong in a scholarly work- just stick to the facts, please!
Overall, I recommend "Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips" despite the weaknesses in the author's discussions of the current state of government-run schools and of alternatives to those schools.
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