Education Reading List

In order to create a reading list on education, I simply googled a few simple phrases that I hoped would lead to some useful results. I also reached out to one or two people whom I trust are far more knowledgable than myself in this specific space. I don't believe that this is necessarily a comprehensive list or a list of the must read books in education. However, it should be a good base in it's entirety. As I read through this and keep adding to it, I hope that I can make it a much more useful list for other people who want to start reading about education.

Videos

An introductory video in the space of education is:
schooling the world

Papers

My interest in education is particularly focused on curriculum and pedagogy. So, I googled something along the lines of "how to develop curriculum" or "best pedagogy". I have just listed out some of the first articles and papers that I found. I hope to improve this list as I get deeper into the topic. I have also added a blog article of a professor of mine, and a home schooling system that a friend mentioned. Like I said, this isn't a well curated base to begin. I just believe that I will be at this for long enough for my exact starting point not to matter as much as the fact that I have started. Over and above this, a few friends advised that I start off by reading the national education policy 2020 and the Pratham annual report on education.

• national education policy 2020
• annual status of education report 2021
• gardners theory of multiple intelligences
• blooms taxonomy
• education ecology in india
• values education pedagogy for Z learners
• dimensions of curriculum design
• 5 standards of effective pedagogy
• the education system in india
• waldorf homeschooling

Bachelor's Degree in Education

After getting a quick read on education from a fairly randomised set of papers, I figured I should next bring some structure to what I learn. The B.Ed syllabus seemed like a good place to start. I assume that this is a good starting point because this is what teachers across India are expected to learn, and this should therefore at least give me an understanding of the current system.

To this end, I plan on reading the following.

1. syllabus for b.ed programme
2. B.Ed. Tutor 1st Semester - C.G. Prasad (HC-1 to HC-6)
3. B.Ed. Tutor 2nd Semester - C.G. Prasad (HC-7 to HC-8)
4. B.Ed. Tutor 3rd Semester - C.G. Prasad (HC-9)
5. B.Ed. Tutor 4th Semester - C.G. Prasad (HC-10 to HC-12)

I began reading the above books. I was interested enough in what I saw in the B.Ed syllabus, as outlined by NCERT. However, as I read through the books I didn't feel like I was really learning anything useful towards my goals. It's possible that the on ground training component is super integral as a part of the B.Ed programme. It's also possible that I picked up the wrong set of books.
In any case, I have abandoned (at least for now) the idea of reading through the B.Ed syllabus.

Open Ended Search

From what I have read, I have been able to fill out the structure that I laid out on the education page. I now intend to try to break things down through first principles and google to refine my understanding. The hope is that a series of articles and papers might help me form a top level understanding of education, rather than a specific book series.
I will of course also read a bunch of books on education along the way, and hope to get some interesting ideas outside of my own restructed thinking.
I plan on putting these ideas into the structure from earlier, and publishing a version of this as a book. The hope is that this target can help drive me towards forming some improved understanding of the field of education in my own mind. And if this book is interesting enough for others to read, that's a big bonus.

List of Books

In order to compile this list, I simply googled "best books on education". I followed 3 lists, and had a look at the top 50 books on each list. I was fascinated to find that there was almost no overlap across these lists. In my mind this means that education is a very broad space, and very few people look at it the same way. It also means that there is a lot which has changed over time, and very few people have a similar view of how to approach education. I have specially marked the books which have been repeated multiple times.

• Goodreads List of Books Shelved as Education

• 50 Great Books on Education (blog article)

• Best Education Books (blog list)

• Google Search Specific to Indian Education

1. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing - Lorin Anderson & David Krathwol
2. All Must Have Prizes - Melanie Phillips
3. Ancient Indian Education - Radha Kumud Mukherjee
4. Antonio Gramsci - Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics - Harold Entwistle
5. An Experiment in Education - Sybil Marshall
6. Audacious Education Purposes - Fernando Reimers
7. Autobiography - John Stuart Mill
8. A University Education - David Willetts
9. Between Past and Future - Hannah Arendt
10. Bringing Knowledge Back In : Michael FD Young
11. Children’s Minds - Margaret Donaldson
12. Creating a Data-Informed Culture in Community Colleges - Brad Phillip & Jordan Horowitz
13. Creating Space for Democracy - Nicholas Longo & Timothy Shaffer
14. Creative Schools - Ken Robinson
15. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain - Zaretta Lynn Hammond
16. Culture and Anarchy - Mathew Arnold
17. Democracy and Education - John Dewey x2
18. Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich x2
19. Design Thinking for School Leaders - Alyssa Gallagher & Kami Thordarson
20. Does Education Matter - Alison Wolf
21. Does Education Matter - Brian Simon
22. Dumbing Us Down - John Taylor
23. Educated - Tara Westover x2
24. Educating Esme - Esme Raji Codell
25. Education, Society and Human Nature - Anthony O’Hear
26. Education Through Art - Herbert Read
27. Emile on Education - Jean-Jaques Rousseau
28. Ethics and Human Nature - Richard Stanley Peters
29. Excellent Sheep - William Deresiewicz
30. Experience and Education - John Dewey
31. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and the Rest of Y’all - Christopher Emdin
32. Foundations of Education - Allan Ornstein, Daniel Levine, Gerry Gutek & David Vocke
33. Freedom to Learn - Carl Rogers
34. Free to Learn - Peter O Gray
35. Future of Indian Education System - Narendra Jadhav
36. Giving Teaching Back to the Teachers - Robin Barrow
37. Handbook on Measurement, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education - Charles Secolsky & Brian Denison
38. History of Indian Education System - YK Singh
39. Health & Physical Education for Elementary Classroom Teachers - Retta Evans & Sandra Sims
40. High School Snapshot - Linda M Teahen
41. How Children Succeed - Paul Tough
42. how children fail - John C Holt x2
43. how children learn - John C Holt
44. How to Improve the Talents of Children - PK Aryq
45. How to Read a Book - Mortimer J Adler
46. How to Run a College - Brian Mitchell & Joseph King
47. How We Learn - Benedict Carey
48. Issues in Indian Education - ML Dhawan
49. I am Malala - Malala Yousafzai
50. Knowledge and Control - Michael FD Young
51. Knowledge and the Curriculum - Paul H Hirst
52. Landmarks in the History of Modern Indian Education - JC Aggarwal
53. Learning Beyond the Classroom - Tom Bentley
54. Learning Centers in the 21st Century - Michael Frizell, David Reedy & Laura Sanders
55. Learning to Labour - Paul E Willis
56. Learning transformed - Eric Scheninger & Thomas Murray
57. Lies My Teacher Told Me - James W Loewen
58. Make It Stick - Peter C Brown
59. Meno - Plato
60. Mindset : The New Psychology of Success - Carol S Dweck
61. Official Knowledge - Michael W Apple
62. On Education - Bertrand Russel
63. Other People’s Children - Lisa D Delpit x2
64. Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
65. Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Frerie x2
66. Protagoras - Plato
67. Punished by Rewards - Alfie Kohn
68. Pushout - Monique W Morris
69. Quiet - Susan Cain
70. Readicide - Kelly Gallagher
71. Reclaiming Childhood - Helene Guldberg
72. Reign of Error - Diane Ravitch
73. Research Methods in Education - Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion & Keith Morrison
74. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture - Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron
75. Savage Inequalities - Jonathan Kozol
76. Schooling in Capitalist America - Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis
77. Schools that Learn - Peter Senge
78. School Choice - David Garcia
79. Some Thoughts Concerning Education - John Locke
80. Special Education - James Kauffman, Daniel Hallahan, Paige Pullen & Jeanmarie Badar
81. Summerhill : A Radical Approach to Child Rearing - Alexander Sutherland Neil
82. Take Control of the Noisy Class - Rob Plevin
83. Teaching as a Subversive Activity - Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner
84. Teaching in the Digital Age for Preschool & Kindergarten - Brian Puerling & Rick Fernandes
85. Teaching to Transgress - Bell Hooks
86. Teach Like a Champion - Doug Lemov
87. Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire - Rafe Esquith
88. The Aims of Education - Alfred North Whitehead
89. The Analytics Revolution in Higher Education - Jonathan Gagliardi, Amelia Parnell, Julia Carpenter-Hubin & Randy L Swing
90. The Book Whisperer - Donalyn Miller
91. The Case Against Education - Bryan Caplan
92. The Courage to Teach - Parker J Palmer
93. The Closing of the American Mind - Alan Bloom
94. The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education - Kathryn Ecclestone & Dennis Hayes
95. The Death & Life of the Great American School System - Dianne Ravitch
96. The Death of Character - James Davison Hunter
97. The Element - Ken Robinson
98. The End of Education - Neil Postman x2
99. The First Days of School - Harry K Wong
100. The Home and the School - JWB Douglas
101. The Idea of a University - John Henry Newman
102. The Language of Education - Israel Scheffler
103. The One World Schoolhouse - Salman Khan x2
104. The Process of Education - Jerome Bruner
105. The Read-Aloud Handbook - Jim Trelease
106. The Republic - Plato
107. The Rise of Women in Higher Education - Gary A Berg
108. The Role of the Teacher - Eric Hoyle
109. The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them - E Hirsch Junior
110. The Shame of the Nation - Jonathan Kozol
111. The Smartest Kids in the World - Amanda Ripley
112. The Study of Education - JW Tibble
113. The Teacher Wars - Dana Goldstein
114. The Voice of Liberal Learning - Michael Oakeshott
115. The Well Trained Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
116. The Well Educated Mind - Susan Wise Bauer
117. Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson
118. Thought and Language - Lev Vygotsky
119. Tinker Taylor - Nelle Eddie
120. Tools of the Mind - Elena Bodrova & Deborah Leong
121. Transformational 21st Century Education - Jennifer Johnston-Jones & Pam Herkner-Chasse
122. Translanguaging for Emerging Bilinguals - Danling Fu, Xenia Hadjioannou, Xiaodi Zhou & Celia Genishi
123. Unconscious Bias in Schools - Tracey Benson, Sarah Fiarman & Glenn Singleton
124. Understanding Education Research - Gary Shank, Janice Pringle & Launcelot Brown
125. Wasted : Why Education Isn’t Educating - Frank Furedi
126. Weapons of Mass Instruction - John Taylor Gatto
127. We Want to Do More than Survive - Bettina L Love
128. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria - Beverly Daniel Tatum
129. Why Don’t Students Like School - Daniel T Willingham
130. World Music Pedagogy Volumes 1-7 - William J Coppola
131. Your Child Can Think Like a Genius - Bernadette Tynan