Nobel prizewinning physicist Wilson tries to illuminate the black hole that is the American educational system. Wilson and journalist Daviss begin where good science begins: defining the problem. US education, they argue, is based on a model—a 19th-century assembly-line model—that simply doesn't work any more. Tinkering, as in raising teachers' salaries or extending the school day, won't solve the problem. What will, among other things, is looking to the successes of corporations in what Wilson and Daviss call the redesign process. It begins with a ``compelling vision'' and continues in the pursuit of excellence through a process of ``research, development, dissemination, and refinement.'' Boeing, Apple, and the Union Pacific Railroad are examples of companies that have used that formula to advantage, involving customers and workers in the redesign. None of these ideas are new, nor are the components they suggest for redesigning education, including Total Quality Learning as demonstrated in Sitka, Alaska (based on Total Quality Management, it involves consulting the ``customer,'' in this case children, teachers, and parents); the idea of students learning from one another; and the more sophisticated and general use of computers as tools for both students and teachers. What is refreshing is the emphasis on relieving teachers of their classroom isolation and offering them professional support and opportunities for continuing development. The authors envision (and offer a budget for) a group of nationwide lab schools, that would draw teachers from surrounding districts to experiment with new programs, new systems, and new ways of managing and teaching. Teachers would then return to their districts to train their colleagues. Still another look at what's wrong with our schools, but one that that targets what makes educational reform so elusive: a continuing communications gap between the classroom teacher—the one who really matters—and the rest of the education profession.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-2145-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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