A liberal critique of our schools and some ideas for possible solutions. The editors of Rethinking Schools, a grassroots journal on school reform based in Milwaukee, Wis., have collected 25 articles and interviews from the journal's eight-year run. Although in the book's foreword Senator Herbert Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, writes that Rethinking Schools resembles ``a good gumbo; it has many distinct flavors that retain their integrity while blending into a tasty and pungent whole,'' this assemblage lacks true diversity. It consists mainly of variations on a leftist critique. Nevertheless, this book is a good resource for anyone interested in the debate over our school system. It includes well-written and cogent articles on multiculturalism and anti-bias education by Henry Louis Gates Jr., among others, and offers criticisms of standard curricula as well as practical guidelines for change. Bill Bigelow, for example, explains how he deals with Columbus's discovery/invasion of the Americas by having his students critically evaluate textbooks on the subject, while Linda Christensen writes about the necessity of teaching formal English without devaluing students' distinctive ways of expressing themselves. (Christensen's piece is particularly well stated, probably because her own lower-class origins give her first-hand knowledge of the humiliation students feel when their speech is mocked by teachers and classmates.) The section on testing and tracking raises more questions about detracking—such as how to grade students fairly in a detracked classroom—than it answers. (Bigelow writes that he was forced to give a student a B because of his effort and improvement when a C would have been a generous grade for him in a regular grading system.) Criticisms of E.D. Hirsch, textbooks adopted in California, and Dr. Seuss's The Lorax are harsh and occasionally petty, and discussions of national policy issues provide no surprises. Not much news for those who are up on the subject, but a good overview for the interested layperson.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-214-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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