A welcome operator’s manual for parents of school-age children, inside or outside the K-12 paradigm.
A manifesto with a lesson plan: home-schooling champion Bauer (The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, 2015, etc.) continues her case for educating outside the system.
“When an artificial system classifies and segregates people (as opposed to cell phones, say, or sewage), some people will inevitably fit into the system better than others.” So observes the author, who goes on to say that she was one who didn’t—and managed to get through a doctorate without the high school diploma that we all supposedly require, having gotten into college in the first place with a “mom-generated transcript.” Some children need the K-12 system, writes Bauer. Others don’t and can actually be harmed by what is, after all, something geared to “a Platonic child, one who doesn’t suddenly melt down, or get overwhelmed by a tidal wave of hormones, or unexpectedly need fourteen hours of sleep.” In any event, Bauer urges, the parent has to take charge: if a child remains in school but has problems, then it’s up to the parent to figure out why Johnny can’t read or Jenny is bored. The possibilities are manifold when it comes to why: autism may be at work, or giftedness, or otherness that the system isn’t able to accommodate. Bauer writes in a steadily reassuring tone before really broaching the subject of home schooling, which, she notes, is not for everyone—but then, she adds, if you’re battling the system because your child is lost, bored, buried, or bullied, “then you’re already spending tremendous amounts of energy fighting to change those things” and might as well take on the task of teacher yourself. On that point, Bauer offers much of practical value, urging, for instance, that we misinterpret the Common Core to mean that certain courses be part of the curriculum when it’s really certain skills that need to be mastered.
A welcome operator’s manual for parents of school-age children, inside or outside the K-12 paradigm.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-28596-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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