Resource Works by John Raven

This book is a valuable resource for teachers, educational psychologists, school administrators, and teacher trainers.

There is widespread agreement among teachers, students, parents, and employers that the main goal of education should be to foster such qualities as initiative, problem-solving ability, the ability to work with others, and the ability to understand and to influence society. But there are hidden barriers to achieving these goals. This book, a summary of more than 25 years of research into the evaluation and improvement of education, clarifies the goals of public education and the method used to reach them.

Clearly written, the book contains five sections and includes an overview of the contents, six chapters concerning the nature and achievement of educational goals—and the reasons for their neglect, three chapters on managing the educational system for effective education or creating an innovative educational system, and a chapter pointing the way forward.

The New Wealth of Nations is a three-part book. Part One is devoted to the problems with current definitions of wealth and the market mechanism. Here, John Raven looks at the failure of the market mechanism to provide the things that determine quality of life and happiness, including satisfactory work experiences and security for the future.

The second part of the book documents the ineffectiveness of public management. One example of this failure is the inability of educational systems to identify or develop people’s most important talents or those that are required to function effectively at work and in society. Raven points directly at the involvement of government in some 75% of the GNP on the basis of arrangements set up when far smaller units were involved.

The third section looks at the way forward. Raven shows the need for free-flowing, organic experimentation in the context of proper arrangements for learning from the effects of action and modifying behavior accordingly. He talks about the need to create innovation designed to find ways of tackling the problems that confront us. We need much more experimentation, the deliberate creation of variety and choice, and evaluation of and information about the consequences of the options.

Raven makes a series of individually realistic recommendations, which, if implemented in a sequential manner, would result in the transformations of society that are so badly needed.