Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning.

• Author: Ohanian, Susan

Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. Jacques Barzun. University of Chicago Press, $24.95. The Classroom Crucible: What Really Works, What Doesn't, and Why. Edward Pauly. Basic, $22.95. Twenty years after my first long day as a teacher, I am convinced that the essence of teaching is not logic, not skill; the essence of teaching is moral action. And if the experts who would tell teachers what to do cannot figure out a way to test for the real qualities of teacherliness-for humor, for depth of knowledge, for compassion, for tolerance, for ambiguity, for steel resolve-then I would invite them to shut up.

And them, in this case, means Jacques Barzun. His Begin Here is billed as a "practical, positive program for better schools," but it amounts to a crotchety collection of short polemics that reveals nothing so much as how out-of-touch Barzun is with classroom realities. Complaining that "during the last 50 years, nearly everything done in school has tended toward the discontinuous, the incoherent, the jiggly," Barzun seems to be typical of so many of our governors, corporate executives, newspaper editors, secretaries of education, and everybody's Aunt Mabel in insisting that his own graduation signaled the end of the golden age of education; school standards have been declining ever since. Barzun bolsters this contention with a broad swipe at everything from computer spell checkers to sex education.

My favorite part of the book is his "eyewitness account" of a seventh-grade history class. Barzun carps that history is not well served by such varied activity as role-playing, small-group discussions, or trips to national monuments. To Barzun, classroom teamwork is a cowardly evasion." Insisting that "the whole class should attend to the same thing," Barzun would have seventh graders read Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. Each student could then write a precis. Students writing the best precis would read them aloud to their classmates. I guess it's not surprising that a man who dismisses all children's books and magazines except Cricket as just "a step up from . . . comic books" would want 12-year-olds to read Prescott, but I wonder how many times he's tried out this ideal lesson plan with real 12-year-olds. Being locked up in a room with 25 seventh graders and a stack of Conquest of Mexicos is as good a definition of hell as I've heard.

Barzun supports his contention that child psychology and specific teaching methods are...