A remarkably sensitive and meticulous investigation of the hurdles to higher education many teens in the U.S. face—and...
A debut book examines a groundbreaking academic program that helps troubled teens find their ways to college.
While a student at the University of California, San Diego, Christopher Yanov was disturbed by the way the allure of gang life extinguished the dreams of so many otherwise promising youths, and he pledged to do something about it. At the age of 22, he started Reality Changers, a nonprofit organization designed to mentor at-risk teens, helping them to enter college. The initiative started modestly, with a class of four eighth-graders and a shoestring budget, operating out of a Presbyterian church. Yanov won a substantial amount of money on the game show Wheel of Fortune, which he used to fund the program, and the number of participating students eventually swelled to more than 500 and magnetized national attention. Membership in the program is demanding: students must maintain a 3.0 GPA; forswear sex, drugs, alcohol, and gangs; enroll in an extracurricular activity; and perform community service. It’s also uncompromising: in a heart-rending moment in author and psychotherapist Davenport’s book, one student is forced to resign after he gets his girlfriend pregnant. The author shadowed five Hispanic students in the program for the expanse of a year, chronicling their challenges and triumphs. More than just a study group, the organization functions as a surrogate family for its students, many of whom come from embattled homes. Davenport furnishes a journalistically taut picture that unsentimentally presents the program’s limitations as well as those of its founder. In addition, she expertly describes the legal and political horizons within which the students reside, particularly with respect to immigration. Two of the participants she followed were undocumented and lived in constant fear of deportation. One student was cautioned by his parents against visiting Dartmouth because he would have to show his ID while boarding a plane, a potentially disastrous situation. The author permits the story to expound itself, showing notable restraint from heavy-handed editorializing or cloying poeticizing. This is a rare achievement: an empirically rigorous history that engages some of the most contentious issues of the day without rancor or agenda.
A remarkably sensitive and meticulous investigation of the hurdles to higher education many teens in the U.S. face—and sometimes clear.Pub Date: June 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-520-28444-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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