Who would think that a story of 25 years of bureaucratic struggle could be so interesting? Perhaps it's because the struggle is over Head Start, the preschool program born of the ideals of the War on Poverty and the activism of the civil-rights movement. Zigler (Psychology/Yale; Project Head Start—co-ed., 1979) was there at the beginning as a member of the Head Start planning committee and later as director of the Office of Child Development, which shaped Head Start. Coauthor Muenchow wrote a 1980 report on Head Start with Zigler and is now executive director of the Florida Children's Forum. Their story is one of shifting alliances, dedicated civil servants, political strategy, surprising heroes (Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch), unsuspected villains (Vice-President Walter Mondale), and a community of parents and teachers who slowly gathered strength and political sophistication until President Bush recently asked Congress for a $600 million increase in Head Start's budget. What sets Head Start apart from other preschool programs that serve disadvantaged communities is its health-check program- -entering four- and five-year-olds receive medical and dental assessments and have their immunizations brought up to date—and its insistence on direct parental involvement in the program. Although evaluation efforts have been problematical—even Zigler suggests that the improved health of the Head Start children rather than the enriched curriculum may be responsible for their improved performance in school—Head Start is both a real and a perceived success. Still fighting to upgrade the program, the authors offer a final chapter advocating how Head Start can be modified (by increasing salaries and social and health services) and even expanded (by opening the program to younger children) to support suggested welfare reforms. A case study in how determination, dedication, and a good cause can bring about social and educational innovation.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1992
ISBN: 0-465-03316-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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