Wood (Education/Ohio Univ.) visits schools and classrooms that are concerned with teaching children, not with satisfying bureaucrats. The children and teachers in N.Y.C.'s pioneering Central Park East Secondary School seem to be so often visited by journalists, researchers, and education specialists that it's hard to imagine they have time for schooling. In this case, Wood spent time at CPESS, as well as at elementary and high schools in New Hampshire (where students of the Thayer School mobilized to head off a toxic- waste site and honed reading, writing, science, and math skills in the process); Georgia (where students produce the renowned Foxfire magazine); Illinois (where parents are an integral part of the workings of Hubbard Woods), and less heralded institutions in Wisconsin and Ohio. The author reports his conversations and observations with warmth—and with the strong conviction that schools should not be factories to assemble future workers, but centers where children can learn to function as informed and thoughtful citizens. His theme is that less is more—less stricture, less structure lead to more flexibility in the classroom and to the skills crucial to a democracy: how to question, how to analyze, how to develop an idea, how to work with one another. Not new (and for a more perceptive report, see Edward B. Fiske's Smart Schools, Smart Kids, 1991), and repetitious at times, but, still, an upbeat, child-centered view of bright spots in American education.
Pub Date: April 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93421-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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
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
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