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
An academic's murky, meandering, and tedious case for the arguable proposition that America's learned professions should pay more systematic attention to the common weal. While Sullivan (Philosophy and Sociology/LaSalle Univ.; coauthor, Habits of the Heart, 1985) tends to avoid specifying precisely which professions he's talking about at any given time, his bromidic ruminations appear to apply mainly to architects, attorneys, and physicians—i.e., callings that require specialized training in fields of codified knowledge. When it suits the author's relentlessly progressive purposes, however, he does not shrink from including administrators, bankers, the clergy, corporate executives, educators, journalists, social scientists, and other high-profile targets in the ranks of those whose shortcomings have, in his view, undermined the public's faith in expert elites. Sullivan tracks the development of a professional class in the egalitarian US from colonial times to today when, he charges, careerism has not only devalued vocational ethics but also made practitioners derelict in their duty to serve the public. He offers constant reminders of the unfulfilled pro bono obligations he believes professionals must undertake in light of the challenges that an increasingly interdependent global society poses for genuinely democratic capitalism. Having taken the professions to task, the author calls on them to engage in thoroughgoing renewal programs that could enhance their accountability and responsibility to communities broader than peer groups. In doing so, unfortunately, he eschews even a modicum of anecdotal evidence in favor of drab critiques or restatements of perspectives borrowed from his intellectual betters: Derek Bok (The Price of Talent); Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling); and William H. Whyte Jr. (The Organization Man), among others. Sullivan also exhibits an irksome penchant for loosely defined terms, from ``civic virtue'' to ``existential cooperation.'' A do-better lecture from an ivory-tower tenant, marred his inability to analyze, let alone explain, the ideals he professes and the institutions he challenges.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88730-727-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
A decade and a half ago, in America Revised, Frances FitzGerald demonstrated that widely used school textbooks presented simplistic, fatuous, and often inaccurate versions of American history. Here, Loewen (Sociology/Univ. of Vermont; Mississippi: Conflict and Change, not reviewed) draws the conclusion that little has changed since then. In a year-long study at the Smithsonian Institution, Loewen reviewed 12 leading high school history textbooks and was appalled by the unscholarly, inaccurate, and overtly ideological material he found. Textbooks, Loewen argues, ``supply irrelevant and erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their treatments of issues ranging from Columbus's second voyage to the possibility of impending ecocide.'' He notes their non-treatment of subjects such as early American settlers' relations with the Indians, Helen Keller's radical socialism (textbooks often present her story only as an inspirational one), Abraham Lincoln's complex attitudes about race, and American atrocities in Vietnam. Loewen contends that American history has traditionally been taught in order to inculcate patriotism and other moral qualities rather than to get at the truth. Moreover, he asserts, the discipline of history, more than other scholarly fields, has traditionally been dominated by upper-class white male writers who share a particular consensus on American history. While the discipline of history has become more sophisticated and diverse in recent decades, Loewen shows, school history textbooks have not kept up. The result is a general lack of interest in history on the part of intelligent students. Loewen concludes that high school history teachers can do much to enhance interest in history by questioning the texts, encouraging students to do primary source work, and continually asking questions rather than providing answers. Although Loewen often is entertaining, he presents both an indictment that rings true and an eloquent call to action. (40 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-100-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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