Schools For An Information Age

This provocative and accessible text is addressed to prospective and practicing teachers who believe schools must be fundamentally reformed to meet student needs in an information age. Drawing on interviews with frontline educators, the authors integrate descriptive accounts of learning and teaching in schools today with emerging multicultural curricula, information technologies, organizational structures that support innovations, and democratic dialogue.

Jones and Maloy offer analytic perspectives for rethinking the social, historical, and philosophical foundations of education along with strategies for teacher renewal and organizational change. Adopting a constructivist-developmental approach to learning, the authors identify endemic dilemmas that increasingly handicap industrial-era schools.

A stagnant economy heightens tensions due to class, race, and gender inequities. Hierarchically structured corporations and representative politics perpetuate business domination. Computers offer possibilities for more open communication, flexible organizations, and democratic discourse. Alternative visions of the future that engage students can renew cooperation, collaboration, and community in schools and society.

Review: Jones and Maloy reconnect schools with community, and our confused, post-industrial society with rich futures made possible through informational technologies and shifts in our current beliefs about the purpose of schools in a democracy. Most importantly, they make us think, about our schools, our children and our role in determining the future of that democracy.

This is an important book. -Robert S. Peterkin Director of the Urban Superintendents Program Harvard Graduate School of Education