An engaging look at the values that represent the best chance for the future of education in America.
An instructive, inspirational debut memoir that recounts a teacher’s lifelong efforts to educate troubled students.
When Golubtchik became principal of a floundering New York inner-city school, he didn’t have the professional experience he needed to prepare him for the job. He’d been a longtime teacher and administrator, but Last Chance High School was a destination for “severely emotionally disturbed” students, cynically labeled “throwaway kids.” He quickly learned that the educational environment was crippled by an unwieldy bureaucracy that wasn’t creative or nimble enough to respond to its students’ challenging needs. Before he could teach them basic skills, he had to confront the stark reality of their broken homes and fractured hopes. The anecdotes can often be despairing: The administration struggled with students smuggling weapons into school and the constant threat of sudden violence; local bodegas sold alcohol to underage students not for profit, but out of fear of retribution; and students complained of hunger, abuse and abandonment. Golubtchik came to realize that no set of minor revisions would improve the school’s educational outcomes; its whole culture needed systemic rehabilitation. He bases much of this book on psychiatrist William Glasser’s “choice theory” and looks at the proper “internal motivations” that may help even the most troubled students to succeed. Overall, this work is a pastiche of personal stories, educational theories and student profiles; one chapter, “Letters from the Trenches,” shares dispiriting but refreshingly candid appraisals of the school before Golubtchik took the helm. Although it often reads like a memoir, it also has elements of a policy wonk’s white paper, along with philosophical reflections on the human condition. The prose is sometimes a bit rough (one chapter subdivision, for example, is titled “He Cursed My Mother So I Hit Him”), but the personal stories are clear and compelling, and the advice on how to improve the educational outcomes of at-risk youth is courageous and profound.
An engaging look at the values that represent the best chance for the future of education in America.Pub Date: June 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481163842
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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