Schooling in America: Scapegoat and Salvation

Sarason argues that the hidden axiom is the belief that schools and school buildings are the best place for education to occur. This assumption is so deeply embedded in our worldview that it is rarely stated, let alone questioned. Every reform movement—back to basics, longer school days, higher standards—presupposes the existing structure and therefore cannot address why the structure itself produces the problems reformers try to fix. Sarason writes that his book 'is not a call for action ... does not contain a blueprint'; its purpose is to challenge this axiom as a necessary first step . Until the presupposition is confronted, he contends, reforms will continue to cycle through the same pattern of raised expectations followed by disillusionment.

Sarason's central claim is that 'schools have been, are, and will continue to be uninteresting places' that are 'inimical to the assimilation and utilization of areas of knowledge that help one understand the social and physical world' . This is not a claim about lazy teachers or bad curricula but about the structural constraints of the setting itself. The 'egg crate' architecture of bounded classrooms within bounded schools creates a context that is too far removed from the multiple ways students experience the world outside. Sarason insists that the uninteresting character of schooling is not an accidental defect but a predictable feature of the organizational form. This conclusion leads him to argue that education should principally take place outside the school, within the community [citation:3].

Mark Holmes, reviewing the book in Interchange, argued that Sarason sets up an impossible criterion of good schooling and then proceeds to fail the school by it. Holmes contended that schools are generally pleasant places and that the problem is not that they are boring but that they are insufficiently characterized by moral and academic direction . He also mocked Sarason's assumption that life outside school is inherently interesting, asking whether 'planned educational activities outside the school are inherently less boring than planned activities within it' . Sarason's reply was pointed: Holmes 'irresponsibly fails to mention' that the book's overarching purpose was to put certain ideas in currency, and that the process of change begins when ideas gain acceptance . Sarason also noted Holmes ignored empirical research on question-asking behavior and curiosity extinction in classrooms.

Sarason cites multiple sources documenting the decline of intellectual engagement across schooling. He references Buxton's study of high school students' attitudes and Susskind's research on question-asking behavior, noting that Susskind's findings are 'highly similar to the dozen previous studies of question-asking in the classroom' . The pattern is consistent: young children arrive curious and inquisitive, and after years of schooling, they are bored and jaded. Sarason argues this is not merely a matter of maturation—he mocks the idea that schools should take responsibility for 'the ravages of human development'—but a consequence of the classroom context itself . The empirical literature, combined with dropout statistics and student disengagement, forms the evidentiary basis for his structural critique.

Sarason explicitly states his book 'is not a call for action ... does not contain a blueprint' . His reasoning is conceptual: any blueprint for an alternative would be evaluated against the very assumptions it seeks to challenge. He writes that 'a blueprint, whether for a building or an institutional change, has a concreteness that too frequently facilitates rejection'—either it seems strange and is dismissed, or it is accepted too quickly without the imaginative work of understanding why change is needed . Sarason's strategy is Socratic: he wants readers to enter into the imaginative process of questioning the axiom themselves, rather than to receive a new plan that would simply replace one unexamined assumption with another. This refusal frustrated reviewers who wanted criteria for evaluating alternatives [citation:11].

The book is the opening statement of a theme Sarason developed across several subsequent works, most notably The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform (1990). The 1983 volume establishes the axiom critique; the later book applies it to explain why reform movements fail in predictable ways. Sarason's argument is continuous with his earlier work on the culture of the school, where he analyzed how organizational regularities and programmatic behaviors resist change. It also connects to his 1973 American Psychologist paper on context for productive learning, which he identifies as deliberately omitting a crucial part of the argument that Schooling in America then develops [citation:19]. The book sits at the center of Sarason's decades-long career as what one anthology calls a 'skeptical visionary' about American education [citation:9].