This insightful, often charming book has much to offer anyone seeking to improve how learning occurs, whether one shares...
A utopian manifesto for replacing compulsory education with self-driven, lifelong learning.
In this erudite but quixotic debut, Hamilton offers a blueprint for franchised learning centers aimed at supplanting traditional schools and revolutionizing society. Physically, her “prepared learning environment” blends elements of libraries, museums, theaters, fitness clubs, and shopping centers to create what she calls a “mall for the mind”—storehouses of knowledge categorized into 33 “loggia,” or galleries, around a central atrium. A bucolic campus features organic farming, unspoiled woodlands, dormitories for students, an inn for visitors, and cottages for seniors, who serve as mentors. Functionally, it abandons regimented classrooms, curricula, and tests that Hamilton persuasively argues suffocate youngsters’ inborn thirst for discovery. According to her plan, learners set the focus and pace of their own studies. She writes that she received this vision while observing her own two children as babies in 1968. After decades working as a teacher, earning a master’s degree in educational administration, and serving on a Tennessee state school board, she gave up on reforming the existing educational model to invent a new one. Here, she deploys a wealth of pedagogical research in the main text and a feast of on-point quotes in the margins. She skewers the status quo with clear examples, cogent analysis, and gentle humor. As she describes her alternative, her prose acquires a dreamlike quality; indeed, she paints scenes so idyllic that they may seem unattainable to readers lacking her passion. Learners “will never feel a single moment of boredom,” adolescents in the dorms “are up early and to bed early, and “ ‘Havenotness’ will become a distant memory of our culture.” Building even a single prototype appears daunting, though she makes a reasonable feasibility pitch. Imagining these centers replacing more than 129,000 K-12 schools in the United States, though, is harder. Unlike the current 98,000-plus public schools, center memberships would be conditional (“based upon training and proven mastery of the two rules of respect and order”) and available to children of all ages. Overall, though, it’s difficult to conceive of them as ever being more than luxury alternatives. For society to embrace such educational autonomy, an absence of grades and standardized credentials would seem as much a precondition for their growth as a result. Still, her remedies shed light on many current problems.
This insightful, often charming book has much to offer anyone seeking to improve how learning occurs, whether one shares Hamilton’s vision or not.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780983011552
Page Count: -
Publisher: Periploi Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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