Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools?
by Siegfried Engelmann
3/5
Attainment Company January 1, 2010
Co-authored with Douglas Carnine, this book connects John Stuart Mill's 1843 System of Logic to modern instructional design. Engelmann and Carnine argue that Mill's four templates for organizing examples so they support only one interpretation are the key to effective teaching — and that if schools had followed this logic, student achievement would be dramatically higher than it is today.
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Jim's Review
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This is Engelmann at his most philosophical. He and Carnine take John Stuart Mill's 1843 work on logic and show how it maps perfectly onto the principles of Direct Instruction. The core insight: if you organize your teaching examples correctly, students can ONLY arrive at the right conclusion. That's not a gimmick — it's how logical induction works. It's a fascinating bridge between 19th-century philosophy and modern education science. Mill figured out the templates for valid reasoning 180 years ago, and Engelmann shows how those same templates should guide how we teach everything from reading to math. This is the most niche of Engelmann's books — you'll want some background in education theory to fully appreciate it. But for those in the field, it's a gem. Three worms — brilliant but very specialized.
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