Benjamin Bloom's All Our Children Learning: A Primer for Parents, Teachers, and Other Educators is, as its title suggests, a compendium of information and articles by Bloom designed to guide parents in educating their children as much as the children's offical teachers. Beginning with overviews, he then addresses the path from home to school and the home's effect on school, school itself, and the process of evaluation. Bloom, author of Bloom's taxonomy, works at the University of Chicago, where John Dewey established a department of pedagogy as well as what amounted to a school of philosophy. He could thus be expected to propose ideas similar to or in harmony with Dewey's ideas of looser structure, investigation over instruction, and philosophical indeterminism. For the most part, this is the case. The ideas remain interesting; the question is whether they are workable.
The theme overall is that of educational reform, as with all such books on education. In the Introduction Bloom states that how quickly the ideas listed here are implemented depends in part on "the public demand for improvement in school learning" (1). However, Bloom is often disarmingly self-effacing and willing to include himself in the mistakes that were made in education. The section "Home and School" deals with the relationship between learning in the home and learning in school; this distinction indicates that Bloom does not include home schooling in his analysis but is instead analyzing only the one-to-many ratio of classroom education, principally public education.
While the prescriptive element clearly is oriented towards the public school, the primary fault of the models is the experimental element. First, many of the schools these methods were tested at were not the standard public school, much less the standard urban public school. They were private schools such as the experimental school John Dewey started to work out his models at the University ...