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THE BLIND ADVANTAGE

HOW GOING BLIND MADE ME A STRONGER PRINCIPAL AND HOW INCLUDING CHILDREN WITH DISABILITIES MADE OUR SCHOOL BETTER FOR EVERYONE

Proves that true vision is about the heart, not the eyes.

Henderson uses his experience with a disability to enhance the learning environment at O’Hearn Elementary School in Boston.

In his 30s, the author began to notice the impact of his degenerative eye disease, and he was told by a doctor to get out of education. Instead, he sought out information and guidance to help him cope with the changes. When he was assigned as principal at his school, he began instituting inclusive policies, drawing on his own struggles and reaching out to others to build a successful program. Henderson knew it wouldn’t be an easy undertaking, but because “O’Hearn was also committed to integrating so many students with disabilities, the entire school community had to focus on additional factors. We had to promote a culture of inclusion in which every student was validated for strengths, welcomed enthusiastically, and encouraged to achieve at high levels.” The author candidly shares the details of this transition, providing engaging anecdotes that highlight the benefits of inclusivity when it is set up properly. His ability to make light of situations with grace and humor carry through in his voice. Henderson’s account does have one glaring omission, however: a lack the perspectives of nondisabled students.

Proves that true vision is about the heart, not the eyes.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-61250-109-3

Page Count: 198

Publisher: Harvard Education Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011

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INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

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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THE ABOLITION OF MAN

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

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