by Mike Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 1995
A spirited, optimistic showcase of the potential of our public schools, gleaned from a wide array of American classrooms. For four years Rose (Lives on the Boundary, 1989), director of the UCLA Writing Program, visited classrooms from rural Montana to New York City. At a time when faith in public education is at its nadir, Rose finds redeeming attributes in America's greatest democratic experiment. The book's findings are a testament to the resilience, boldness, and inventiveness of our nation's educators. Whether on Chicago's South Side or in Kentucky's coal country, those teachers who are in the forefront of meaningful eduction share a deep respect for their students (both as individuals and as members of distinct communities and cultures) and a determination not to be bound by the bureaucracy of traditional pedagogy, which departmentalizes knowledge and divides students by age rather than ability. Elena Castro, for example, a teacher in the southern border town of Calexico, integrates language arts with science, enabling students to study in more interesting contexts. In the course of a school day, her elementary school students shift from one work station to another: They might edit a story on the computer at the Publishing Station or work on mathematics with the assistance of audiotapes at the Listening Station. Students are free to follow their interests and assume responsibility for mastering their studies. Castro responds to a problem student by asking herself, ``What can I do that will work for this child?'' The featured educators integrate the distinct histories of their students along with day-to-day realities into a curriculum that respects all cultures. In the author's analysis, these teachers also tend to communicate more successfully with their colleagues and with the parents of their studentsinteraction deemed an integral part of the educational process. With these creative models, Rose skillfully restores hope to public education. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-74546-2
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993
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
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1947
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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