All for One, One for All

A tiny band of educational critics has recently produced a flurry of books complaining that U.S. public schools stifle, rather than stimulate, the natural joy that children should find in learning. While these academic reformers differ considerably in their formulas for improvement, they do have one big bond in common: each has written rave reviews urging the public to read the books of the others.

The inner circle of back scratchers consists of John Holt (How Children Learn), Jonathan Kozol (Death at an Early Age), Robert Coles (Children of Crisis), Edgar Z. Friedenberg (Coming of Age in America) and Herbert Kohl (36 Children). By no coincidence at all, Holt lauded Kozol's book in the New York Review of Books. Kozol praised Holt's book in LIFE and Friedenberg's book in the Christian Science Monitor. Coles exalted the Kozol and Friedenberg books in reviews for the New York Times. Friedenberg, in turn, gushed over Kozol's writing in the Saturday Review. Kohl, who included a short story by Kozol in an anthology called The Age of Complexity, is writing a Holt rave for the New York Review of Books.

The sequence is not over. Although Kohl's book will not be released until Jan. 15, two of his fellow critics have already stepped way ahead of the pack to push it in print--Friedenberg praised it in the Saturday Review, while Coles wrote a blurb that appears on the dust jacket.

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