Sure to please educators, parents and anyone interested in regional Tennessee history.
The story of a pioneering high school that uniquely records the challenges, struggles and triumphs by one Tennessee community to provide an equal and quality education to African-American students during the age of school segregation and beyond.
The small town of Whiteville, Tenn., did not plan on spearheading educational innovation. From meager beginnings, its Allen-White High School searched for a common educational vision that the community could share–a vision focused on achievement and excellence at a time when African-American students were living through one of the darkest periods of the 20th century. Robertson recounts the early years of the Allen-White school and the slow but steady evolution that led to its becoming a role model for other African-American communities struggling with the burdens of inadequate education. While Allen-White turned out to be exceptional, it suffered from the same difficulties felt by African-Americans throughout the South–deprivation, racism and second-class citizenship. But with leadership and the support of parents, Allen-White set the stage for countless other schools and communities throughout the United States to step up and achieve their dreams of academic excellence. What this book lacks in pages it more than makes up for in spirit and character. Robertson keeps things frank and honest, and at no time does the prose become muddled by sentimentality or mawkish commentary. The narrative is bare bones, resulting in an unmistakably clear and resonant message. When it comes to creative thinking in education, Education and the American Dream demonstrates that any community can make its dreams come true if will and vision are present. This is no-frills chronicle is information rich and historically significant.
Sure to please educators, parents and anyone interested in regional Tennessee history.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-4092-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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