by E.D. Hirsch Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2020
A fervent plea for reforming American schools.
A prominent educator asserts that shared knowledge is crucial for national unity.
More than 30 years after the publication of his controversial Cultural Literacy, Hirsch, now in his 90s, offers his “farewell book about American early schooling,” which reprises his critique of fragmented, idiosyncratic curricula and insists on the importance of shared content. “Elevating rationality and natural science above emotional and religious sentiments,” the author debunks what he calls the “educational romanticism” of thinkers such as John Dewey, who believed that teaching should be based on a child’s interests rather than a teacher-created curriculum. This pedagogy, Hirsch maintains, has led to a dumbed-down, haphazard curriculum of “mush.” Citing research from the National Academy of Sciences, among other sources, the author asserts that falling verbal test scores—and the nation’s low rankings in reading, math, and science in relation to other developed countries—result from the misguided notion that critical thinking, problem solving, and reading comprehension are skills that can be taught apart from content. Here, the author quotes Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson: “there is no such thing as developing a general skill.” Hirsch’s ideal curricula have three important criteria: coherence over time, ensuring that students build on a knowledge base; commonality of references and vocabulary to form an inclusive speech community in the classroom; and specificity of content. The author recounts his interviews with teachers and a school superintendent who express their dismay over contentless curricula and praise shared-knowledge schools, such as those adopting the curriculum that Hirsch created as founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation. In an afterword addressed to parents, the author offers “free downloadable materials” from the foundation. Anticipating critics who worry about “lockstep uniformity,” Hirsch celebrates “unity in diversity” that can bind us “in civic duty toward the good of the whole.” Americans’ lack of civic engagement and ignorance of history, he argues, require nothing less than “an educational revolution.”
A fervent plea for reforming American schools.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-300192-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
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