Journalist Rathbone, who has written for the New York Daily News and the Miami Herald, spent a year observing life in a New York City public high school—and found herself in deeper than she'd expected. The hero of her book is West Side High's principal, Ed Reynolds, who welcomes kids with histories of disciplinary problems and who have met with sundry other failures at traditional schools. Reynolds distinguishes himself not only by becoming a figure to whom students can feel close (most call him ``Ed,'' and with respect) but also by taking a personal interest in seemingly every even vaguely redeemable hard-luck student case. Rathbone reflects that Reynolds's empathy was shaped in large part by having lost his foster son, who was involved in drugs, to suicide. The author's own vision, however, can seem a bit uneven at times. In her fascinating look at the gangs so popular with some of her subjects, she unveils for outsiders a world that would otherwise remain mostly invisible. Still, she gives too much credit to the family relationships fostered by gangs. For example, Rathbone laments the ``divorce'' of two teenage members of a gang who were first ``married'' by the authority of the organization's ritual. In fairness, though, the author is the first to concede that her loyalties may sometimes have been skewed by her own troubled upbringing. And she is able to maintain a professional distinction between the high-school teachers' feelings about her as an outsider and her recognition that these teachers are giving fully of themselves to help their kids. It's this level of honesty and admittedly imperfect objectivity that make Rathbone's experiment a success. She contrives no happy endings for students who cannot find them. Neither does she paint a hopeless picture to assail or depress us. Her version of the facts is refreshing. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-87113-707-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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