How Children Fail by John Holt Pitman, 181 pp., $4.50 The
Student and his Studies by Esther Raushenbush Wesleyan, 204 pp.,
$5.00 These two books complement each other superbly. Both
undertake to show how students use schooling to release and
develop their particular talent and capacity; and with the ways
in which they so often fail. Mr. Holt and Mrs. Raushenbush write
about education as a process that may either nurture or stultify
human development, and both describe in detail just what occurs
in the student in response to the demands the school makes, and
the opportunities it affords. What distinguishes their work from
nearly everything else that has recently been written about
American education is the meticulous attention and respect they
accord to the experience of the particular youngsters they
discuss. The unsentimental devotion to education that leads them
to describe the students they have observed as persons, rather
than as cases, augments the sharp contrasts within the picture
they present: failure