A must-read for those concerned with the welfare of young men.
How and why one man helped start an all-boys public school in New York City.
Concerned with the number of young men in New York who seemed destined to wind up in prison due to their race and socioeconomic status, Banks decided to try to change the pattern. Along with a group of men called the One Hundred Black Men, they founded the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a public school catering to just boys. From its rough beginnings to its successful current state, Banks, with co-author Lichtenberg (co-author: Know What Makes Them Tick: How to Successfully Negotiate Almost Any Situation, 2010, etc.), gives readers an in-depth look at the methods he used to help at-risk boys become productive, successful members of society. "The Eagle Method is not specific to race or socioeconomic status," writes Banks. "It is a philosophy and a set of practical strategies that can be adapted to embrace and support young men of any background to achieve their promise and potential." School days are longer than the average, with boys attending classes until 5:00 p.m., plus weekend activities. By dismissing students along with the teachers, rather than their peers, who might influence Eagle students into trying alcohol, drugs and other risky behaviors, Eagle students are kept occupied and safe from attitudes that contradict the academy’s model. Students are grouped into houses, similar to those in Harry Potter's world, and they eat together and participate in extracurricular activities together, building a sense of community. Ultimately, the instructors seek to assess the needs of each individual boy and fill in the missing gaps that might prevent a student from achieving his full potential. After 30 years and hundreds of success stories, many of which are included, Banks' method works.
A must-read for those concerned with the welfare of young men.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6095-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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