Successfully captures the enthusiasm of an inspirational student body.
An introduction to several students who grew up around the millennium and attend a unique school for learning differences.
Brookhart, a teacher at Denver Academy, notes that older generations often label children born between 1990 and 2009 (who he dubs “Millenials”) as spoiled, overscheduled, collaborative and wise beyond their years. A generation raised by celebrity culture, cell phones and MySpace, these Millennials grew up immersed in technology and accustomed to the reality that their every action might be recorded or documented. The author believes that despite their negative stereotypes, Millennials are the first truly global generation and, due to their celebration of diversity, could potentially bridge the gaps among different cultures around the world. In this class-project book, several of Brookhart’s students share their learning experiences, personal histories, academic papers and creative writing. Denver Academy caters to students who, despite their intelligence, have problems in the public school system due to learning disabilities or behavioral problems such as ADHD, sensory disorders or severe dyslexia. Teachers at Denver Academy incorporate unique teaching techniques–the use of electronic multimedia tools or allowing for extra breaks–that cater to each student’s style and drastically improve their performances. The most compelling sections of the book consist of the kids’ personal stories, although their constant references to the Myers-Briggs personality test and the inclusion of typical “compare and contrast” essays make their accounts sound distractingly academic at times. The editor purposely made minimal changes to the students’ writing to preserve the original spirit of their work, but the occasional misspelled word could easily be corrected without sacrificing the students’ voices. The Millennial generation, the students of Denver Academy and the teaching methods used at the school could easily be three separate books, so Globalistic sometimes struggles in presenting a cohesive collection.
Successfully captures the enthusiasm of an inspirational student body.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1442174528
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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