An outspoken call to arms on behalf of America's children, by the chancellor of N.Y.C.'s school system. This kind of frank critique of political power-struggles is usually written after the author is out of the job. But Fernandez is still the man in charge, fighting to bring order, academic excellence, and clean bathrooms to the city's turbulent schools. Recruited from his job as superintendent of the Dade County schools, which include Miami's, he landed running in the Big Apple, immediately weeding out incompetent school principals and teachers and overturning corrupt local school boards. Fernandez is also the man who supported distributing condoms to high-school students. But most of his book is a defense of school-based management (the teachers, parents, and principal plan the program), community involvement, and creative solutions to educational dilemmas—all based on Fernandez's Florida experiences. With the help of former Sports Illustrated editor Underwood, Fernandez relates his history: birth and childhood in Harlem; truant; high-school dropout; drug abuser; rescue by the military (G.I. bill). An aptitude in math led him to teaching. In Miami, his formidable ego, intense commitment, and fierce energy propelled him to school administration and innovations that drew international attention. There are no real exposÇs here: Most of the opinions and information about Governor Mario Cuomo, Mayor David Dinkins, Board of Education politics, and Miami scandals have received coverage on the air and in print- -coverage that has led to Fernandez, with his forceful opinions and ways, being called a dictator, a martinet, and a man with his eye on the post of US secretary of education. Maybe so. What is most important here, though, is Fernandez's eloquent plea to remember what schools are about: educating our children in the best possible environment with the best possible teachers. (Twenty-five b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-27918-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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