A fierce and thought-provoking condemnation of the American school system.
Author, filmmaker, and musician Soling presents a manifesto for empowering students in a system of mandatory education.
The author states his case in blunt terms, addressing high-school-aged readers directly and informing them that schools are places of humiliation by design: “By being deprived of free speech and free assembly, you are literally held captive,” he writes. “By being forced to sit in an uncomfortable chair all day long and listen to someone you did not choose to listen to, and read texts you do not want to read, your most basic democratic rights are violated.” In these pages, Soling outlines what he sees as the evils of the educational system, from locker searches to corporal punishment (which is legal in 19 states, and which he rightly calls “sickening”). He also describes the many things students can do to fight such evils, from organizing protests to filing police reports. Although many of the actions that he advocates in this slim work may have significant consequences for students, including poor grades, he repeatedly stresses that they shouldn’t commit illegal acts while disrupting the formal structure of their education. Because the book is polemical in nature, it’s unsurprising that it includes a chapter titled “Bad Arguments in Defense of Schooling”; the author ably short-circuits notions that it teaches interpersonal skills or acclimates students to authority structures they’ll encounter in adult life. For Soling, school is nothing more than “an institution that selectively dispenses information in an incoherent manner within an oppressive construct that interferes with learning,” and he effectively offers no compromise on this point. Indeed, his prose is electric in its passion and anger; even readers who are unconvinced by his case are likely to find themselves rethinking old certainties about a pillar of American life.
A fierce and thought-provoking condemnation of the American school system.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2015
ISBN: 9780990939900
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Spectacle Films, Inc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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