A provocative study questions the value and/or harm of conformity in a school setting.
A close look at four young "troubled" kids in school.
When children enter the public school system, they are expected to sit still for long periods of time, listen, and do as they are told. In this intriguing, in-depth look at four young children, educator Shalaby examines the damage that may be done to kids who must conform. "Our schools are designed to prepare children to take their assumed place in the social order rather than to question and challenge that order," writes the author, who uses pseudonyms for her subjects. "Even our supposedly 'best' schools—maybe especially these most well-resourced, largely white schools—fail to give young people a chance to teach and learn the meaning, the responsibilities, and the demands of freedom." Despite the disciplinary actions of their teachers, the four children the author followed in school, and later in their homes, continue to express their individuality. Zora hides a handful of straws at lunch one day so she can build a “super straw.” Lucas is quickly bored during a read-aloud session and interrupts the class by going to get his own book to read. Sean engages in silly antics to garner a laugh or affirmation when the class work is boring. Marcus is full of energy and hidden stress, which pops out at inconvenient times. These children are not alone; there are numerous others who find it difficult to adapt to and obey the rigid structure of a typical school day. Shalaby ponders what's being lost when these highly inquisitive, energetic, think-outside-the-box kids are forced, through constant discipline, ridicule, and/or medications, to suppress their individuality. It's an important question, which teachers and parents should be asking when they notice a child expressing him- or herself in ways that aren’t necessarily “normal.”
A provocative study questions the value and/or harm of conformity in a school setting.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-236-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
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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