This book is a collection of essays in which the author counters high-stakes testing, the pathologizing of children, and the unrelenting critique of public schools with a persuasive account of how children actively make sense of the world and their experience through the making of works, such as drawings, constructions, and writings. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "On a Human Scale: Works, Lives, Schools," introduces the large ideas that recur across the essays and map the territory of the book as a whole. The essays in part 2, "The Politics of Educating/The Politics of Work," juxtapose the narrower vision and definitions of persons, of work, and of educating that prevail when one starts from an economic frame onto the broad framework presented part 1. Part 3,"Standards in the Making," selects standards as the locus of the struggle for human and humane schools. Part 4, "Generation/Regeneration," consists of a single talk that pivots on the responsibility of elders to children. An appendix contains the reference edition of the Prospect School Archive. (Contains 78 references.) (RT)