The first-person account of a neophyte history teacher in an inner-city high school: White, Republican, Ivy League, he epitomizes The Man to his mostly black and Hispanic students. What 23-year-old Gerson had going for him in September 1994 was his youth, his straightforward attitude, his skill at and knowledge of basketball, and a sense of humor. For instance, when his students pulled detention for classroom infractions, he kept them after school to listen to Frank Sinatra recordings in an unsuccessful effort to wean them from rap. The kids came to call it getting a Frank. As a teacher, Gerson labored to engage the students by embedding facts in dramatic stories of historical figures—a favorite with the students was the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In current events, the O.J. Simpson trial was used as a springboard for discussions about constitutional rights. The school was a Roman Catholic institution in the heart of Jersey City, an enclave of civility, although it had its share of teenage pregnancies and family crises. The children came from neighborhoods rife with drug dealers and street shootings, and many had friends and relatives in prison. But their parents backed the school and the teachers and demanded hard work from their children, having made considerable sacrifices to pay tuition—conditions that are a barometer for school success, according to the latest studies. Nonetheless, what Gerson learned is that there are still two Americas, one rich and one poor, living side by side in suburb and city, respectively, yet each with its own social system and goals. Reconciling the two, Gerson suggests, takes more than tweaking educational practices. Among his suggestions: Personal contact between social classes, perhaps through a national service plan. Engaging anecdotes of a school year, leading to a thoughtful exploration of what urban and suburban cultures can learn from each other.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82756-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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