A refreshingly novel parenting method for teaching children not just to read but to write well and love doing it.
Helicopter parents take note: Mother and author Allyn (Pam Allyn’s Best Books for Boys, 2011, etc.), executive director of LitLife and LitWorld, sets forth a rigorous and, she argues, foolproof strategy for giving a child priceless gifts based on the stage-by-stage cultivation of top-level writing skills. These gifts include a reverence for words, a higher probability of academic success and a leg up negotiating adulthood. For parents, all it takes is time in abundance and years of highly focused effort. Start with plenty of storytelling and songs for newborns to 2-year-olds before moving on to shape-and-bake alphabet pretzels. Later, there’s a designated “writer’s corner” to which the young author can withdraw to muse privately or find his or her writing voice. Fifty remedies for writer’s block help make the words flow. Age-appropriate book lists (don’t look for classics) inspire children and parents along the way. Allyn argues convincingly that to make it all work, parents must be tireless writing advocates intent on forging a writing bond with their children—and the sooner, the better. She exhorts parents to understand that being well read and able to express opinions and feelings in writing is the bedrock of a good education, and is essential to self-discovery. All highly laudatory, but it’s debatable whether parents will have the time and the will to execute the myriad steps in the program.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781583334393
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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