TEACHER

by Sylvia Ashton-Warner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 1963

Report repeated from the March 1st bulletin, when scheduled for spring publication as follows: ""This is the workbook-scrapbook of Miss Ashton-Warner's creative Teaching Scheme which she developed in a small Maori school, some of which was the substratum of Spinster, all of which defends and demonstrates Anna rontosov's conviction in the earlier book,- 'I must do what I believe and I believe what I do'. This can be very simply reduced to the concept that all education must be part of the child's world- integral and organic; so it is that her small children wrote their own primers and learned to read through the words of their own experience, not Dick and Jane's. This record is in part an amplification of the program which she developed and in part a day to day view of life in the school where she taught for almost twenty years and where her husband was headmaster. Some of the concepts are older ones (i.e. the teacher can only provide the external framework for the creative force- Plato; the emphasis on the natural child- (ousseau; etc.) but her book is remarkable for the quality of spontaneity she icits and protects in her children, and for its own; it is filled with many ranom illuminations ('What about when the illusions of life drop off? Some time before death? They're better on.'). It also reflects, expectedly, her own remarkable eceptivity ('The least thing stirs me; the greatest cannot make me quake') and her mobile awareness of life on the wing.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1963

ISBN: 0671617680

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION