A passionate and intelligent account.
A lively, dramatic, and provocative story of one writer’s sojourn into one of our nation’s most diverse public high schools.
Maran (Notes From an Incomplete Revolution, 1997) spent one year tracing the lives of three seniors at Berkeley High School: a somewhat troubled white boy from a well-to-do family, a biracial superachiever, and a functionally illiterate African-American football star. What emerges is a fascinating account highlighting the inequalities that characterize our nation’s public schools. Although Berkeley is considered a model of integration (with African-American, Latino, Asian, white, and interracial students), it actually houses several separate and unequal schools. The white students make up 30 percent of the school system, but they comprise more than 90 percent of all Advanced Placement classes. And while 85 percent of Berkeley High graduates go to college, only 14 percent of these college-bound seniors are African-American. (Many more African-Americans, in fact, eventually go to prison than to college.) Not surprisingly, these clearly delineated socioeconomic differences result in all kinds of tensions: in the course of Maran’s year, the school was plagued by arson, corruption, ineptitude, and plummeting teacher morale. The author concludes her exposé with a number of suggestions to improve Berkeley and other public schools. While her suggestion to abolish private schools in order to improve the status of public ones is at once naïve and frightening, she also suggests creating smaller classes, a more demanding curriculum, increased parental involvement, and higher teacher salaries.
A passionate and intelligent account.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26568-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
