An impassioned plea for inspiring education. It’s up to educators to act.
Much-needed systemic change starts in schools.
After acclaimed British educator Ken Robinson died in 2020, his daughter, Kate, resolved to honor his legacy by creating this volume, a distillation of his core ideas about how to reimagine education and schooling so that young people could flourish. “Dad’s work,” she writes, “was a love letter to human potential.” Education reform is central to Robinson’s exhortation for a wide-reaching revolution that “calls for a global reset of our social systems” and a “new, wider conception of human ability, and an embrace of the richness of our diversity of talents.” This revolution is urgently needed in order to face a rapidly changing world and an increasingly vulnerable planet. “As a species,” he writes, “we have progressed to the point where many of our systems are now outdated or entirely obsolete. The good news is that it is within our powers to do something about it.” Comparing current schooling to industrial farming, Robinson critiques education that is focused on disciplinary distinctions, a narrow definition of intelligence, and learning that is assessed through testing. He believes “there is no such thing as an academic subject, only academic ways of looking at things. It is not what is being studied, but how it is being studied.” Education should promote young people’s engagement with the world around them as well as the world within them; improve their understanding of their own cultures and respect for the diversity of others; and give them resources to become economically responsible and independent and “active and compassionate citizens.” To achieve these goals, Robinson identifies eight core competencies: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure (“a sense of personal harmony and balance”), and citizenship. Rather than offer a blueprint for reform, Robinson urges teachers, parents, policymakers, and students themselves to imagine a school ecosystem that empowers, encourages, and nurtures all of its participants.
An impassioned plea for inspiring education. It’s up to educators to act.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-14-313416-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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