In many ways, a laudable template for restructuring education, but unlikely to have much impact.
A sweeping if muddled plan to reshape the nation’s educational system—beginning with the community, not the classroom.
A veteran of 30 years in the education system, Wagner (How Schools Change, not reviewed) is now co-director of a leadership group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a senior advisor on education to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here, he decries the call for “reform” that has politicians, business leaders, and even educators in a scramble to standardize testing, tinker with curricula, and micro-manage teachers in the classroom, among other stopgap measures. In the past hundred years, the world has changed radically, Wagner says, but America’s educational system hasn’t really been modified at all. Educators, politicians, parents, business leaders, and students must set aside their special interests and in “civil discourse” at the local level set new goals for schools tied to the information age, not the industrial revolution. Wagner is all over the lot—perhaps rightly so—in discussing such widespread social problems as lack of motivation, lack of commitment, fear and cynicism about change, plus the isolation of children from adults and the isolation of teachers from each other. As a prime example of a school that solved many of these problems, we once again have the Central Park East Secondary School in New York City, the darling of visionary educators. CPESS used what Wagner dubs approvingly the “merit badge” approach to education, that is, students were required to prove their proficiencies in subjects by doing, not testing. Wagner’s most valuable contribution here is reporting on his own work with communities whose school systems were in disarray and how, through forums and focus groups, common goals were established and successfully implemented on the local level, creating what he calls the “New Village School.”
In many ways, a laudable template for restructuring education, but unlikely to have much impact.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-415-92769-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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