Creed mixed with memoir by a veteran educator. The hottest issues in education now—school choice and voucher plans—are offshoots of acorns cultivated, if not planted, by this author 30 years ago. Kohl (Should We Burn Babar?, 1995, etc.) has long been a controversial figure in the debate over so-called open classrooms and community-based teaching. In this new book, which reflects on his teaching experiences from the early 1960s to the present, Kohl champions, as always, the students who taught him as much as he taught them, whether in kindergarten, sixth grade, high school, or college. He begins with his earliest assignments in New York City public schools, where black and Latino children predominated, and with his unusually committed service to their parents and communities. He also lays out his struggle with ``the business of school reform'' and emphasizes that reform remains ``a business, more so in the 1990s than ever before.'' Kohl meanwhile mourns the growing stigmatization of children with learning disabilities and celebrates the founding of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, which brings writers into New York City schools as mentors. After New York, he went on to teach in Berkeley, Calif., both at the college level and privately, seemingly always excited by his students and appalled by a teaching establishment more concerned with its own vested interests than with the lives of children. Then returning to New York as a kind of master teacher, Kohl notes yet again—but doesnt expound on—what an extraordinarily talented and well-trained teacher it takes to find and nurture the best in every student. No contrary critical voice intervenes to offset his unfortunate tone of patting himself on the back. Nevertheless, this is a book that will recharge a teacher's batteries.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-81412-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
Rosenblatt, a contributing editor at Time and essayist on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, unhappily recalls the turmoil that ``exposed an entire generational rift and touched upon antagonisms that have not been mended to this day.'' Months of verbal hostilities were set off by the violent (by Harvard standards) takeover of a campus building in an antiwar protest by SDS members and their allies, which was followed by the police overreaction, administrative hand-wringing, and widespread rejection of personal responsibility that those who lived through the era will recall as the usual sequence of events. As a young instructor popular with both students and faculty, Rosenblatt was named to a committee charged with investigating the incident and recommending discipline for many of the participants. The man in the middle predictably ended up displeasing both sides. Rosenblatt (The Man in the Water and Other Essays, 1994, etc.), finds the principal cause of the students' bad behavior in an atmosphere of loneliness and alienation that seemed to be part of Harvard's institutional heritage. Despite that measure of sympathy, his judgment of the Harvard undergraduates of the period (who included Al Gore, Michael Kinsley, Al Franken, Mark Helprin, and Tommy Lee Jones) is tough: ``The students were not only sure they were right; they were sure they were wonderful.'' On the other hand, his disillusionment with the professoriat, most of which he found ``mean and narrow-mind,'' ultimately drove him from academe. Rosenblatt was a decade older than the Baby Boomers he taught, and he describes his younger self as essentially apolitical; one can question whether he comprehends even now the force of Vietnam in driving much of a younger generation to excess. His account nonetheless rings true. Not only perceptive, it's also one of the more entertaining memoirs of the era. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-75726-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
A convincing call to reexamine the way children learn in their earliest years, and to make use of those new findings in classrooms. MacArthur fellow Gardner (Education/Harvard; To Open Minds, 1989, etc.) developed a theory that human beings learn and perform through multiple intelligences (seven, to be precise, from verbal to kinesthetic and interpersonal). His own and other studies in these areas revealed that students who may be letter-perfect in a school subject such as physics fail spectacularly in transferring that knowledge from classroom exercises to problems in the real world. Even adults abandon book learning and invoke pictures of the world—including stereotypes about the forces of gravity or about skin color—that they constructed as early as five years old. The emperor is exposed as being not only naked but ignorant. If such early childhood ``schema,'' as Piaget called them, are so tenacious, then harness them for learning in the advanced classroom, Gardner advises. He recommends reevaluating the concept of apprenticeships and using the hands-on, multimedia techniques seen in children's museum programs. The developmental theories of Piaget and Chomsky are respectfully challenged, the push to ``cultural literacy'' and ``back to basics'' less respectfully. At issue is the unexamined idea. Gardner calls for schools and teachers to encourage personal ``Christopherian confrontations,'' the encounter between belief and reality that Christopher Columbus presented when he did not sail off the edge of the world. An exciting proposal for restructuring schools in order to guide students to a genuine understanding of the world. A bonus is the extraordinary insight into why children and adults seem to resist learning and why they often behave in such mystifying ways.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-465-08895-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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