and we don't, as americans, tend to think we're philosophical, and we tend to think we don't have a philosophy; we j--we just do what works. but what i try to show in this book is that, over 100 years, there has been a philosophy at work. it's a philosophy that, in most cases, parents are not in sync with and even teachers are not in sync with, and it's been a raining down of theory--and in many cases, bad theory--on the schools. so that it's 100 years of arguing about who should be taught and what should they be taught and how--how we should run schools. and i guess one purpose was to show that the kinds of debates we're having to--today didn't come from nowhere; there's a history. and so that's the story i've been trying to tell. c-span: who's the most important writer in history or philosopher in history about education, from your standpoint? >> guest: well, i would say that far and a--wide, it's john dewey. don--john dewey was very, very important; had a huge influence, both for good and for ill. c-span: what was good about his philosophy? >> guest: well, i would say that the--the good--and i--i can't define his philosophy in general because he--i have a--i think two shelves at home filled with dewey's books, and i won't pretend to have read them all, but i've read his educational work. he's very sensitive to children he, i think, makes people aware that how children learn is very important, that their motivation is very important and that their interest level is also very important. that ha--was a very positive contribution that dewey made. the negative side is that he fuzzed things up an awful lot. he tended to make statements that, 'interest was more important than effort,' and his followers took this to mean that effort wasn't important at all; that interest was the only thing that counted. and a lot of--of, to my mind, unsuccessful education movements came about because of people either misreading d--dewey or sometimes reading him accurately, but picking out the parts of dewey that led them to say, 'let's throw away curriculum. let's throw away subject matter let's let kids do what they want to do,' or in some cases, 'let's meet the needs of society,' thinking that they were following dewey, and tracking kids relentlessly. c-span: th--this may not work, but if john dewey was alive today, which of the presidential candidates would have him as their chief adviser on education? >> guest: neither one. dewey was a socialist, and i suspect he would be very unhappy with both candidates. c-span: as a socialist, what would he stand for vs. what they stand for? >> guest: well, i would say that, on the whole, dewey primarily stood for the child-centered school, the idea that you try to find whatever is interesting in the moment and build on that to--to take the child up to higher levels of understanding. i think that we can all learn from reading, for instance, about the school that dewey himself ran. and whereas--the cliche is that he was the great exponent of child-centered schooling where there was no subject matter, in fact, in the dewey school, which he started at the end of the 19th century, children were learning about history; they were learning about the--the explorations of--of the americas; they were learning wonderful history and literature, but his teachers sat together every day and talked about, 'how can we make this engaging? how can we take the traditional subject matter and make it exciting and lively for the children?' i think that would be--that--that's an exciting kind of education. unfortunately, the way it g--tended to get translated in public schools was, 'let's track kids, and let's have some kids get the really good academic stuff, and others don't need subject matter at all because subject matter's not very important.' c-span: when did john dewey live? >> guest: dewey died--i think it was in 1948. he was born in 1859. he had a very long life. he lived to see lots and lots of changes. but i think his educational philosophy was consistent, and he was a very--very large influence. c-span: where did he live? >> guest: he was born in vermont. he taught in michigan, university of chicago and columbia and lived most of his life in new york city. c-span: and if we found him in a debate with somebody who'd be directly opposite, opposed to what he had to say back during that time, who would it be? >> guest: i'd say it would be probably william torrey harris, and i write a fair amount about harris. harris was commissioner of education, and he believed that subject matter was very important; that i--the different major subject matter, and by that, i mean like history and literature and mathematics and science, language--that all of these represented very concrete, important forms of human experience and that it was the job of the school to expose all children to these subject matters. and harris was also a great reformer in his time. he introduced the kindergarten when he was superintendent of schools in st. louis. but he was mainly a--a strong proponent of a liberal education for all children. c-span: you went to school where? >> guest: houston, texas. c-span: your original elementary school level? >> guest: oh, i went all the way through public schools in houston: montross elementary school, seton elementary school, albertson e. johnson junior high, sancho seno high school. i don't think any of those schools still exist anymore in houston. c-span: what do you remember about your houston education? >> guest: there was--i had some wonderful teachers. i had some terrible teachers. it's--we--we also had racially segregated schools. the high school was strongly tracked. the kids who--some kids, like me, were put into the college track. others, the majority, were tracked into vocational programs or what they called at that time distributive education, where they were sent off to work for half the day. and a decision was made--as i show in this book, a decision was made pretty early on about which kids were going to be college bound and which were not. c-span: how was it decided that you were going to be college bound? >> guest: oh, i'm sure there were tests. they gave us all kinds of tests and--iq tests, aptitude tests. it was a lot of testing to track kids. what i found in my book was that the--the--these were all progressive movements. i mean, the--the great discovery for me, as i was doing this research--and i should say that i've been writing history of education now for 30 years. and what i've tried to do here was to bring together a lot of work that i've done to say, 'i want to step back and look at the 20th century and see how--what light it sheds on what we know today and what we're debating today.' but what i found was that we've had a series of reform movements, and the first great reform movement, at the beginning of the century--this--the 20th century was industrial education. and the idea of the industrial education movement was, 'let's make schooling prepare kids for work.' but not everybody needed to be prepared for work, and so they selected kids out. the children of immigrants, the children of farmers, the children of industrial workers would be slated for that kind of work. and then along comes the iq-testing movement. this, it turns out--the guys who developed the iq test were progressive reformers. they wanted education to be scientific. after all, dewey had said that science h--that education should meet the needs of society; that it should be scientific. and here, they had the iq test, which they thought would sort kids early and decide who would go into the college-bound track so when i was in high school in the 1950s in houston, texas, i was actually living the legacy of this history that i'd just wrote because, in fact, the schools were using the test to identify kids early on and to select those that would be college material. and the majority, they believed, were not college material, and the majority were sent off into different vocational kinds of programs. c-span: did you have an iq test? and >> guest: absolutely. c-span: did you ever know what your iq is? >> guest: no. they didn't disclose--at the time i was in school, they never disclosed to us what our tests were. in fact, i went to school at a time where we weren't even told what our sat scores were. that was considered confidential. c-span: what i--what is the iq? >> guest: the iq test is an--it's an aptitude test, and the distinction between iq tests and achievement tests is--is this. iq is a predictor, and an achievement test tests what you've learned. and i find myself thinking achievement tests are pretty good because if you've studied and--you'll do well on the test, and that's fair because if everyone has a chance to learn the same material and then be tested on it, you can -- with -- with effort, you can do well with the iq test, it's a test of: can you solve problems? can you figure out puzzles? do you know the analogy between these words and these words? the sat is based on the iq, or at least the verbal part of the sat is a -- a -- a quasi-intelligence test, and it's a test of capacity and not--it's not supposed to be a test of what you've learned. what i show in the book, though, is that hi--even iq is highly conditioned by your back--parent background, whether your parents went to college or not or whether they were high school dropouts. so the i--even the iq test is not a pure test of your innate iq, but an awful lot of educators believed that it was a test of innate iq, and so they felt that they could very early on, say--in fourth grade or fifth grade, say, 'this child's going to--is college bound, and these children are not.' c-span: i--who invented the iq test? >> guest: oh, the iq test was invented by a frenchman, galton, in--in france, obviously, and he created the iq test as a way of identifying children who were--who had problems, children who had different kinds of special--what we would call special needs children. and his idea--and this was back in the beginning of the century--his idea was you could use the iq test, identify these children, use a--use the test in a diagnostic way and then use the test to help them learn more. when the iq test came to the us, it was translated by a man named lewis terman at stanford university, and it was then turned into--during world war i, the psychologists of america offered their services to the us army and said, 'we can develop a test that will allow you to immediately classify the almost two million people coming into the--the army and quickly decide who's officer material and who's not.' and the iq test results made--were--were--leant themselves to all kinds of generalizations about ethnic groups and racial groups. and there were a number of books and articles that followed the re--release of these iq results from--from world war i where leading psychologists were making all sorts of very racist statements about black people, white people, about different white ethnic groups and saying that, 'southern--southern europeans were stupid b--based on the iq test.' what the iq s--tests were really measuring, i believe, was partly innate ability, but to another large extent, they were measuring educational opportunity. and so recruits from the south--white recruits from the south didn't do as well as black recruits from the north. but it took--it took several years before there was a corrective. and one of the results of iq testing during world war i was immigration restriction because so many americans were convinced, as the iq testing people said, that the average recruit--or the average american iq was only 13. so they said, 'well, this is the end of democracy. how can we have a democracy when our people are so stupid?' and there was just enormous misinformation spread around the country based on these iq tests but the--you know, the next step in the i--with the iq test was that they just were adopted en masse in american public schools... c-span: do they still give them? >> guest: ... and in private schools also. no, i think the iq tests are given now on an individual basis for sp--particular kids particular problems to identify extremely talented kids or kids with extreme problems. but they are not, so far as i know, being given en masse the way they were during the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s and even well into the '60s. c-span: who started the sat? >> guest: the sat was developed by the college board. the college board now still is responsible for the sat. c-span: who's the college board? >> guest: the college board is an organization. it was created at the beginning of the century, and it was a collaboration of a lot of different colleges. and they had all been given--giving individual examinations, and they realized at some point that this was very inefficient. if--if it--if a young person wanted to go to college, they would have to prepare specifically for the exam given by that college, and then they wouldn't be prepared for the exams given by all the other colleges. so the colleges got together and, around 1900, 1901, they created something called a college entrance examination board, and they would every year give examinations. and it would be a common examination, mainly essay tests, in which teachers would--and professors would sit together, write the exams, and then students would meet and take several hours of exams, and their scores would be reported to wherever they wanted to go to college. in 1941, when the war--world war ii broke out, the colleges decided to abandon the old college boards, these kind of rigorous, handwritten exams, which had to be hand-read or individually read, and they adopted the sat. the sat had been developed by a man named carl brigham with--working with other people carl brigham was one of the psychologists who created the group iq test. he also wrote one of the most infamous racist books--i think it was called a "study of american intelligence"--in which he warned the american people, after world war i, looking at these iq test results, that the nation would be in grave danger if it didn't stop immigration because the people flowing into the us in large numbers from europe were--had the lowest iqs and that it was going to be a serious threat to the future of the nation. brigham's work was widely reported at the time, and it took him several years before he wrote a tiny article saying, 'i think i may have been wrong'; that it may have been a mistake to do--make the huge leaps he had and to use the iq test scores the way he had. but by then, the congress had passed immigration restriction, and by then--this was by the late '20s--he was working for the college board developing the sat. and the college board, which is this group of colleges which had collaborated--the college board then encouraged brigham and--and other educational psychologists to begin developing a multiple-choice test. and they--there was such interest in multiple-choice testing in, particularly, iq testing, and the college board began to--saying, 'well, you know, maybe--maybe these written exams and these essay tests and the performance exams that we're giving--maybe they're--they're--they're old-fashioned. maybe we should turn to science.' and modern science was represented by these psychologists, who were considered to be the avant-garde. so the psychologists developed a multiple-choice test, and when world war ii broke out, the colleges--the--the leaders of the college board got together and said, 'we're switching en masse to the sat,' and they did that. it was a--basically, a--almost a--i would say it wasn't a snap judgment 'cause they had been preparing for it for almost 15 years, but they did switch. and since then, the--the sat has been the key; that--plus the s--the act have been the key tests for entrance to college. c-span: is there a differ--excuse me--much of a difference between the act and the sat? >> guest: well, the sat traditionally has been a test of verbal and math. and the verbal test is very much like an iq test. the math is a pretty rigorous math test. the act test, which most kids in the midwest take, i--is mainly subject matter. on the sat, if you want to do subject matter, you take other tests, achievement tests, which were a different set of tests. c-span: back to your houston experience. what were your parents doing for a living? >> guest: my parents ran small liquor stores, like joe lieberman's parents. they had package stores. they both worked long hours; they'd work till--early in the morning till late at night. and i was the third of eight children. c-span: and where are the other eight today--or the other seven? >> guest: oh, all over the place. they're all alive; my parents are not. my--i have a--a brother in los angeles, a--a sister who runs a wild animal farm in florida. i have a brother in chicago and four siblings still in houston. c-span: and y--think--again, think back to your education in houston. who was your best teacher and why? >> guest: well, my best teacher was my homeroom teacher. she was also my english teacher and i used to correspond with her until she died. she died in an old-age home in--in south carolina. c-span: what was her name? >> guest: mrs. ratliff, mrs. ruby ratliff. and i--i remember when i first called her, and this must have been 15 years after i'd graduated and i'd just published my first book. so it was--oh, i guess it was about 1975. my first book was "a history of the new york city public schools." and so i called mrs. ratliff and said to her i had published a book and that i wanted to a--let her know she'd been my very best teacher, and i told her what i loved about her, which is that she had given me so much wonderful poetry that i had memorized and committed to heart. and i could look back at having learned bits of pope and wordsworth and--and all of the great poets--english and american poets. and so she started crying, and i said, 'mrs. ratliff, what's the matter?' and she said, 'i was teaching out of license. i was really a social studies teacher, but i loved english.' and i once gave a speech at the national council of teachers of english, and i told that story, and everyone started applauding because they remembered those kinds of teachers, the teachers who really loved literature. and i feel very sorry for--for kids today who are--are getting their reading from textbooks and--and from--i--i've read a lot of the current textbooks in use. they tend to prefer stories written by their own staff or--or written by a kind of chop shop, where they write stories that have the right number of male, female characters, the right ethnic representation. there'll be a grandma who's handi--who's not handicapped. the grandma'll always be very active and vigorous. but they'll--they'll--having that kind of balance is more important than having literary quality, and i--i think it's--the literature is not literature. it's usually totally non-memorable. it's just words. and since i--i can still think about the poetry that i've read and--and that it gave me this great love of--of literature, i--you know, that strikes me as one of the great things about why i still love mrs. ratliff, even if she was teaching out of field. c-span: who else? can you name another teacher or two? >> guest: oh, yeah, sure. i had a social studies teacher who had also taught me english and social studies, nelda davis and miss davis later became the supervisor of social studies for--for houston. and another english teacher, mrs. reeves. and many years after i graduated, i was invited back to houston by the man who was then the superintendent of schools, and i got an honor, and none of my teachers were still around, except mrs. reeves, and she was the supervisor of english for the school system. and i said, 'mrs. reeves, i am so glad that when i was in the houston public schools, that i learned grammar. and at t