A scathing look at the New York City Public School system from a Newsday reporter who spent the 1988-89 school year as a junior high school math teacher. Ms. Sacher raises numerous questions in this probing, personal — sometimes farcical — account. Why teach exponents to eighth grade youngsters who can barely add? Why haven't eight graders who can hardly read and write been referred to Special Education? Why are indifferent, insensitive teachers allowed to remain in the classroom? Why have students on a third grade level been receiving satisfactory or better report cards? None of these questions are answered to her, or our, satisfaction. Ms. Sacher is reluctant to place the onus entirely on the bureaucratic system or on callous teachers. The problems run far deeper, she offers, when children come to school hungry and lacking basic social skills. The most moving sections of this excellent account are Ms. Sacher's visits to her students' homes. The origin of so many of the problems is rooted here. Ms. Sacher's year was remarkable not only for what she was able to observe and record, but also for what she could accomplish in the classroom. She was determined to teach her students and win over even the most troubled and hostile ones. She succeeded on both accounts. In the tradition of Bel Kaufman's Up the Down Staircase and Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age, this first-hand narrative is no small victory.
Pub Date: April 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-69034-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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