Successful failure

"School success and failure are not a natural result of the way children are born or made to be. In this controversial book, anthropologists Herve Varenne and Ray McDermott argue that a well-organized cultural fabrication lies beneath the American fascination with producing, documenting, and explaining success and failure in school. This practice is the cause of much pain even though it is neither necessary nor productive for the education of citizens in a modern democracy. The authors' critique is based on detailed ethnographic analyses of the complex activities and problems of children and adults trying to learn together in and around schools. The book shows how to move away from deprivation and difference explanations of failure and toward a direct confrontation with the conditions of everyone in America."--BOOK JACKET.