A welcome if controversial call for parents to take control of their children’s education.
A manifesto for parents.
This is a book about “education entrepreneurship”—the development of models for teaching and learning that go outside the traditional schoolroom and innovate in the cognitive and social development of children. Written with zeal, the book encourages parents to play a larger role in their children’s education. The author lays out learning outcomes as socially driven: “I want a happier, more joyful learning environment for my child.…I want a more customized, personalized academic experience.…I want my child to be respected as an individual.” Through a series of case studies, the book traces the success of several educational entrepreneurs. Some are home-schoolers. Some are technologists of learning. Some are teachers who have set up their own institutions. “To shatter the collective illusions surrounding education, parents should be honest and upfront about their desire for difference in education.” Some may question the premises and motives of this book. Is education like a Silicon Valley startup? Are schools “small businesses?” Are students “stakeholders?” Should parents “market” their success? Anyone who cares about public education and content-based curricula will be impatient with this book. But parents who have found local schools lacking in support may be inspired to take teaching into their own hands. It may be easy to parody this book’s narratives: “Jen’s story of building a school that intentionally integrates neurodiverse and neurotypical students is one example of how entrepreneurial parents and teachers are taking the initiative to create community-based learning solutions for children whose identities, experiences, or educational needs are not being met in traditional schools.” What’s harder is to ask ourselves, what is school for these days?
A welcome if controversial call for parents to take control of their children’s education.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781541705524
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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