Overambitious but challenging condemnation of schools as learning grounds for hatred.
In her first book, Klein (Sociology and Criminal Justice/Adelphi Univ.) presents an exhaustive and sure-to-be-controversial examination of school shootings, and, more broadly, the culture of violence, intimidation and exclusion that typifies the school experience in America.
“[O]ur children,” she writes, “feel terrorized and tormented on a daily basis.” Boys and girls in school, and increasingly out of school through cyberspace, are subject to a rigid and unforgiving hierarchy based on violently enforced norms. Any deviation from these norms—of rigid heterosexuality, of the proper status symbols signifying wealth, of being strong and able-bodied—is met with a barrage of violent and aggressive behavior, ceaseless bullying and ferocious isolation. In what Klein terms a culture of “hypermasculinity,” cruelty is not only expected but deemed necessary—to not bully is to be bullied. In such a context, school shootings are not so much aberrations but the ultimate act of bullying and affirmation of masculinity by students, mostly boys, marginalized beyond endurance. Students learn bullying behavior from adults, who engage in the same type of individualistic status seeking or simply look the other way in tacit approval of bullying as the norm. In turn, the whole of society sanctions such aggression and cruelty as unbridled capitalism makes life a zero-sum game in which the terror of not making it becomes a war of all against all. While we may not be able to transform the overall culture, Klein provides numerous examples in which compassion and cooperation become dominant values. While the author writes with clarity and compassion—this is hardly a dry academic tome—it is a big leap from the murderous actions of a few to the condemnation of an entire economic system. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss Klein’s thesis out of hand, as she offers an opportunity for us to examine, discuss and consider the world we have created for our children.
Overambitious but challenging condemnation of schools as learning grounds for hatred.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8147-4888-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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
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