Teachers, concerned parents, political leaders—Kirp’s book has something for everyone, and it deserves the widest possible...
Hopeful news from the education front.
George W. Bush’s teach-to-the-test No Child Left Behind Act has done untold damage to American education, as has the wholesale defunding of public school systems in favor of private schools that are mostly reserved for the wealthy. Kirp (Public Policy/Univ. of California; Kids First, 2011, etc.) observes that in recent years, “fewer white students and more poor and nonwhite students have enrolled in public school,” with the predictable result that public schools have in the main become uncompetitive since they are underserved. He examines the case of Union City, N.J., to show that this is not a requisite destiny: There, in an area of deep poverty (“below such famously troubled cities as Mobile, Milwaukee, and Oakland”), a committed group of administrators, teachers and parents have formed an educational community to defy the odds. “Community” is an operative word, and the secrets for forging it and bringing new life to the classroom are, by Kirp’s account, fairly few. He identifies some of the keys ones: high-quality, all-day preschool for all children beginning at the age of 3, then “word-soaked classrooms” that emphasize language skills (and therefore thinking skills). Against the prevailing English-only ethos, Union City teaches immigrant children fluency in their language, then fluency in English. The school system actively reaches out to parents to form educational partnerships, and there are plenty of abrazos—hugs, that is, to create a culture of caring. What Kirp considers an exemplary public school system that is a demonstrable improvement over what generally prevails now is replicable everywhere, requiring only fiercely hard work.
Teachers, concerned parents, political leaders—Kirp’s book has something for everyone, and it deserves the widest possible audience discussion.Pub Date: April 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-998749-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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