The Academic Achievement Challenge, by the late Jeanne Chall, is the perfect cure for a case of Kozolitis. In fact, it's a tonic for anyone who’s convinced that the best educational methods for teaching children are the most ‘up to date’, ‘progressive’ and ‘creative’ ones.

Chall is not an exciting writer – she’s frequently drab and workmanlike, and she repeats herself regularly – but she’s systematic and relentless in cataloguing a century’s worth of education research into how best to teach children: the creative, progressive ‘child-centered’ approach; or the traditional, disciplined ‘teacher-centered’ approach. Chall demonstrates that the latter is the clear winner in almost all reputable studies, whether in 1910 or 1999.

Chall is no ideologue – she agrees that the best teachers obviously balance elements of both approaches – but she’s clearly disturbed that so many children have been allowed to pass through so many years of schooling in the USA for so long while learning so very, very little. And since Chall was Professor of Education at Harvard, her credentials are impeccable, making it hard for liberals, teachers and other education professionals to ignore her conclusions.

Another strength of Chall’s historical breadth is that it allows her to illustrate, over and over, again how current ‘innovations’ in teaching children are just warmed-over products of Dewey and other early 20th-century progressivists. And yet Chall manages to tell this essential and damning story in just under 200 pages.

Highly, highly recommended. ( )