Painstakingly researched and detailed blueprint for building a better school lunchroom today.
Two Angry Moms filmmaker Kalafa arms health-conscious parents with the know-how to take back their school cafeterias.
Most readers are already convinced that the highly processed, minimally nutritious goop sitting atop their child’s lunch tray must be replaced with real food. But how? The author’s well-researched book has the answers. As anyone who has even contemplated taking on the Byzantine institution that is the National School Lunch Program knows, the odds of actually upending the system are slim. The predominance of obsequious clods at the levers of power and the lack of adequate funding make any change seem almost impossible. Junk-food conglomerates have long ago succeeded in casting kids in the role of nascent consumers—and the choices they offer are all bad. Buoyed by extensive case studies that both inform and inspire, Kalafa’s how-to guide covers all the bases from networking with local organic farmers to writing successful RFPs (Request for Proposals). Whether the overall goal is simply to bump some greasy fries off the school menu or to have a totally new kitchen installed for from-scratch cooking, no lunchroom revolutionary should be without this battlefield manual. The good news is that, nationwide, parents and other concerned citizens are scoring victories in the battle to bring nutritious, whole food to the school-lunch menu. You can too.
Painstakingly researched and detailed blueprint for building a better school lunchroom today.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58542-862-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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