A thought-provoking but potentially controversial plan for revamping the American public school system.
An ambitious call for a top-to-bottom revamping of American education.
Educator Stoddard (Opinions of a Maverick Educator, 2016, etc.) begins this brief but sweeping manifesto with three stark assertions: that standardized, high school classroom curricula drastically underserve students by enforcing conformity, that a radically new system would accentuate the individuality and potential of each student, and that the existence of the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional. In place of the traditional educational curriculum—in which students in kindergarten through 12th grades are taught a standard set of subjects, including math, science, English, and history—Stoddard envisions a program called “Educating for Human Greatness,” which “makes it possible for every student to excel in what they were born to be good at doing” by emphasizing eight specific qualities, including Identity (“The power of knowing who we are as special contributors to society”), Inquiry (“The powers of curiosity and effective investigation”), and Interaction (“The powers of caring communication and healthy relationships”). These qualities would form the basis of a student-centered educational model featuring “wise mentors” in “home-room advisory” classes across the country. Under his program, all classes would be elective, traditional graduation requirements would be abolished, and numerous new class topics would replace the customary core curriculum. Stoddard presents his plan in consistently clear and accessible prose. However, no amount of clarity will deflect likely objections by seasoned educators, or even by parents who remember initially disliking core curriculum subjects that they now enjoy—or use to make a living. Stoddard’s system not only assumes that all students are forward-thinking, aspirational, and in love with learning, but also calls for massive school-funding increases of a type that only the federal government, of which he’s strongly critical, can pay for. Readers will have to assess how much of the author’s dream they share, which seems to employ wishful thinking about a post-grades future.
A thought-provoking but potentially controversial plan for revamping the American public school system.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61493-547-6
Page Count: 92
Publisher: The Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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