An impressively thoughtful and thoroughly practical guide for educational reform.
Corbin details her plan for a thorough modernization of American education.
In 2000, the author established the PAST Foundation (Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology), an organization designed to challenge the “outdated factory-based model of education” that relies on rote memorization, offers one-size-fits-all pedagogies, and fails to prepare students for the employment realities of today, especially in technology. As became painfully clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, per Corbin, the current educational system needs a “radical recalibration” that fosters individual agency, transforms classrooms into vibrant “ecosystems of inquiry,” and prepares students to solve real-world problems. In helpfully accessible language free of turgid academic jargon, the author describes her vision for education’s future, one in which a broader swath of students is prepared to enter the technology industry. In fact, Corbin contends it is precisely this industry, and the innovations it has produced, that has rendered the traditional models of education obsolete. “A tremendous disconnect exists between learning in school and applications in the real world. The ubiquity of technology makes rote memorization unnecessary—data is at our fingertips, yet learning in school largely focuses on studying facts and not thinking critically, leaving students unprepared to solve today’s problems.” The author presents an expansive range of ideas, including the transformation of teachers into “facilitators” who give students more opportunities to think and participate, as well as the incorporation of real R&D projects to stimulate student inquiry. This is an exceedingly practical volume that prioritizes actionable plans over ideological abstractions—Corbin discusses, in painstaking detail, new ways to think about student assessment, new approaches to fostering an inclusive classroom environment, and the potential advantages of artificial intelligence for teachers. This provocative book astutely combines a general philosophical orientation with a myriad of minutely detailed strategies.
An impressively thoughtful and thoroughly practical guide for educational reform.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2024
ISBN: 9798343544183
Page Count: 249
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.
A former NFL player casts his gimlet eye on American race relations.
In his first book, Acho, an analyst for Fox Sports who grew up in Dallas as the son of Nigerian immigrants, addresses White readers who have sent him questions about Black history and culture. “My childhood,” he writes, “was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80-90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.” While the author avoids condescending to readers who already acknowledge their White privilege or understand why it’s unacceptable to use the N-word, he’s also attuned to the sensitive nature of the topic. As such, he has created “a place where questions you may have been afraid to ask get answered.” Acho has a deft touch and a historian’s knack for marshaling facts. He packs a lot into his concise narrative, from an incisive historical breakdown of American racial unrest and violence to the ways of cultural appropriation: Your friend respecting and appreciating Black arts and culture? OK. Kim Kardashian showing off her braids and attributing her sense of style to Bo Derek? Not so much. Within larger chapters, the text, which originated with the author’s online video series with the same title, is neatly organized under helpful headings: “Let’s rewind,” “Let’s get uncomfortable,” “Talk it, walk it.” Acho can be funny, but that’s not his goal—nor is he pedaling gotcha zingers or pleas for headlines. The author delivers exactly what he promises in the title, tackling difficult topics with the depth of an engaged cultural thinker and the style of an experienced wordsmith. Throughout, Acho is a friendly guide, seeking to sow understanding even if it means risking just a little discord.
This guide to Black culture for White people is accessible but rarely easy.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-80046-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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