A combative tone informs a forthright argument for the importance of sparking students’ motivation.
An educator recalls his struggle to define true learning.
In a candid, often bitter memoir, Wagner (Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, 2012, etc.), a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and former high school teacher, principal, and professor of teacher education, offers a harsh critique of schooling—traditional and nontraditional—that he claims quashes students’ love of learning. Most of his schooling was stultifying: He felt like an “outlier” at the small, coeducational, private elementary school that he attended; an all-boys middle school was worse. Disaffected and defiant, he earned such bad grades that he was not invited back for high school. Instead, his parents sent him to a boarding school where one frustrated teacher shouted at him, “you’re always gonna be a fuckup,” an admonition that haunted him throughout his life. Wagner’s demanding, unsympathetic parents tried yet another school—“a ‘last chance’ school,” he soon discovered—where a kind English teacher encouraged his creative writing ability. Overall, though, his teachers were unable “to help me make sense of myself and the world around me.” After dropping out of two colleges, Wagner found the Friends World Institute, which allowed students to travel the world to study social issues. That pedagogy reminded him of Summerhill, an experimental learning environment where children followed their interests without restrictive requirements or formal classes. Friends World endorsed Wagner’s independent program to examine education that “supported individual’s strivings for growth and self-development.” The author reached the epiphany that “having an interest wasn’t enough. You also have to develop the muscles of self-discipline and concentration needed to pursue your interest and deepen your knowledge and understanding.” Graduate study proved as disappointing as earlier educational experiences, and he deems the classes he took at the Harvard Graduate School of Education “a complete waste of time.” As a teacher and administrator, despite his good intentions, Wagner suffered failures, which he blames on overconfidence and teacher resistance; eventually, he joined and led several educational reform projects.
A combative tone informs a forthright argument for the importance of sparking students’ motivation.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56187-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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