A grab-bag of helpful hints for parents and teachers, but far from comprehensive. (65 b&w photos, not seen)
An art teacher shares miscellaneous tips and tricks to familiarize elementary-school children with the basic materials and awaken their creativity.
Beal is less concerned with philosophical questions about the nature or purpose of art than with the practical side of being an art teacher. Beginning with the injunction, “I think primarily in terms of art materials,” she offers sensible hints for arranging the art classroom, protecting clothing from stains, and structuring lessons appropriate for children at various developmental stages. The six chapters that follow each focus on a single medium: collage, drawing, painting, clay, printmaking, and construction. Each chapter consists of short sections on materials, techniques, appropriate adult responses and lesson plans arranged in no particular sequence, concluding with questions and answers for parents hoping to adapt the techniques for home use. The chatty, informal tone is attractive, and parents and art teachers will make good use of the innumerable concrete suggestions for contriving materials and supplies, doubtless accumulated over years of classroom experience (transfer Elmer’s glue into baby-food jars, Beal urges, and always recondition used clay by poking a hole in it, filling it with water, and letting it sit in an airtight container before presenting it to a child). Parents and neophyte teachers will also benefit from her many examples of encouraging, thought-provoking responses to children’s creations. However, the conversational approach has its pitfalls. Spread over various chapters, the treatment of developmental stages and lesson-planning fizzles out into vague directives to have a sense of purpose. The loose organization of the chapters and the book as a whole, rambling among practical techniques, philosophical ruminations, and descriptions of children’s achievements, is also likely to frustrate any harried teacher or parent looking for substantial information on a particular medium, or an in-depth, focused discussion of educational strategies.
A grab-bag of helpful hints for parents and teachers, but far from comprehensive. (65 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-52770-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
