This book gives teachers and parents strong talking points when approaching boards, politicians, and government agencies...
An educator argues for an investment in a new kind of public school.
Stoddard (Educating for Human Greatness, 2010, etc.) spent 25 years as a public school teacher and principal. As political winds begin to favor the expansion of charter schools, this self-proclaimed “maverick” wishes to turn standardized education on its head. Instead of forcing students to perform according to a proscribed array of academic standards, he believes children should be judged by their own customized sets, based on their unique talents: “If the purpose of education is to develop quality human beings, we may better understand why we need a system that uses subject-matter content to develop human qualities.” Children, he writes, “thrive when treated as individuals, but they rebel, drop out, bully, become apathetic, or even commit suicide when we ignore their personhood and try to standardize them like machines.” While the author offers no apology for his unfavorable assessment of the American educational system, he asks for readers’ patience when they spot the recurrence of key ideas. Since many of the 38 chapters consist of newspaper editorials that Stoddard wrote while pitching his concepts to the public, he repeats himself frequently. But his plainspoken, journalistic style makes the book a quick read. His audience should immediately grasp his love of teaching and sincere desire to make schools—and, by extension, society—better places. Unfortunately, the work lacks concrete instruction on how to make these changes happen—that is, what exactly communities should do to get approval from state and federal governments to redesign public schools. To readers anxious to enact his principles, Stoddard advises, “Press for your freedom, as specified by the Tenth Amendment, to develop a local school system that encourages and supports teachers.” Ultimately, this worthy volume should not be read by itself but rather as an accompaniment to the author’s preceding work, which offers more in-depth suggestions.
This book gives teachers and parents strong talking points when approaching boards, politicians, and government agencies with appeals for changes in public schools.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 134
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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