A persuasive call for updating educational standards to meet the challenge of globalization.
Hobert, a Boston educator, proposes grading America's schools on how well curricula are training students in areas such as conflict-resolution skills and foreign languages, and encouraging travel abroad and service-related activities.
“We have to use curricula in US schools to build bridges not moats,” he writes. The author explains that at the time of 9/11, he was teaching French and Spanish in a Boston secondary school. He was dismayed by President George W. Bush's speech naming Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an Axis of Evil and distressed when suicide bombers in Jerusalem killed schoolchildren. This led him to create the nonprofit organization Axis of Hope. After reading the headline about the bombing, he decided to scrap his lesson plan for the day and conduct discussions with his classes on how the U.S. and other governments might intervene to defuse violence and lay a foundation for global peaceful coexistence. This spur-of-the-moment workshop was transformative. He decided that his vocation was to teach students how to think globally and to help create curricula for schools and community groups. Under the auspices of Axis of Hope, Hobert began conducting conflict-resolution workshops for middle and high school students and educators and teaching a course (Educating Global Citizens) at Boston University School of Education. Since the U.S. has the third-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, and Mandarin Chinese is spoken by a majority of the world's population, the author proposes that these be incorporated in primary-through-secondary school education. Hobert weaves in a number of entertaining anecdotes about his own experience to illustrate his points. He describes traveling abroad with his parents, shepherding high school student trips and conducting a workshop about conflict resolution.
A persuasive call for updating educational standards to meet the challenge of globalization.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3288-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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