Lives on the Boundary, by noted education scholar Mike Rose, is a work of non-fiction that explores the challenges and successes associated with literacy at the margins of America’s education system. Much of the work is autobiographical and explores Rose’s own challenges both learning and teaching reading and writing.
Synopsis
Rose opens the book by describing his early childhood in a poverty-stricken area of south Los Angeles. He talks of the challenges of coming from a working-class neighborhood and growing up in an immigrant family and how both negatively influenced his attitude towards and chances for quality education. Rose describes how an early classification as a remedial student became a self-fulfilling prophecy until a group of remarkable high school teachers inspired him to reevaluate himself and encouraged him to attend college. Rose describes the impact of this guidance and details how he overcame inadequate preparation, and a conflicted family life, to graduate from Loyola University (now Loyola Marymount University) and then receive a graduate fellowship in English at UCLA. However, Rose describes his dissatisfaction with graduate studies in English and how he left UCLA to teach remedial English in inner-city Los Angeles. Rose goes on to recount several years of teaching a range of underprepared students—elementary students to Vietnam veterans—and how literacy shaped the lives of such students. Rose then recounts how this teaching lead him back to UCLA, to a position as a director in UCLA’s tutoring center, and how he dealt with the challenges of underprepared college students and institutional bureaucracy. As the book closes Rose moves away from the details of his own life and concludes by engaging several arguments relating to literacy and educational opportunity, particularly as such issues relate to higher education.
Key Themes and Ideas
The central idea of Rose’s book is that educationally underprepared students—students often labeled as basic or remedial—deserve more credit then they are given. So-called remedial students, Rose argues, fail not because of poor skills or intelligence, but because of narrow understanding and limited opportunity. In turn, Rose goes on to explore the nature of such understanding and opportunity. In particular, Rose examines how economic and social forces influence both the perception and performance of underprepared students. Rose points out that the public outcry against declining educational performance, and the data that supports such fears, is misguided and should be reexamined in a broader context. Rose contends that current methods for assessing learning are short-sighted and misused. In addition, Rose critiques popular approaches for teaching literacy skills to underprepared students—specifically pedagogies that focus primarily on grammar—and calls for a more rigorous and enveloping curriculum.
Legacy
First published in 1989, Lives on the Boundary has gone on to become one of the most significant books in the field of education. In addition to being a bestselling book, Lives on the Boundary is the recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English.