Award-winning journalist Tyre (Journalism/Columbia Univ.; The Trouble With Boys, 2009, etc.) adds new perspective to the depressing state of American education with real-world lessons for parents.
Many parents assume that affluent schools and small class size provide the best education for children. This is not necessarily true, writes the author. Interspersed with dreary anecdotes and myth-busting studies, the author’s latest focuses on early education (preschool through junior high) to help parents make good school choices. Dismal facts include the National Center for Education Statistics’ finding that “about a third of children in our public schools fail to become proficient readers.” Thankfully, Tyre offers solutions. With a splash of history, the author discusses pedagogies, as well as what to look for in a good preschool teacher (highly verbal teachers are most effective). In addition, parents should not be afraid to ask about a teacher’s degree or a school’s number of first-year instructors. Tyre outlines many red flags, such as the derogatory “widget” mentality—i.e. administrators who view teachers as interchangeable cogs with identical skill sets. She cautions against using standardized test scores as accurate indicators of school performance. Scores broken down by subgroups and long-term trends offer more information. Not everyone has the luxury of choice, but the author provides respectful ways for approaching—or changing—the system. She also emphasizes working with children at home for a greater educational experience. This is not an indictment of teachers, but rather an eye-opening tool for parental involvement.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9353-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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