A useful book for all who believe in American democracy.
A history of the nation’s cultural conflicts over public education and a call to action in our current one.
“Today’s efforts to root out ‘woke’ indoctrination from schools are also a warmed-over version of a panic we’ve seen before,” write Berkshire and Schneider, co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, who draw a line from the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to the present day. Calling the specifics of these eruptions “distractions,” they argue that “the real policy goal…is to dismantle public schools as we know them.” The stakes are high. Berkshire and Schneider walk readers through the history and philosophy of American public education, offering an overview of past controversies before focusing on today’s particularly virulent iteration, when education has become a galvanizing political issue. They focus on religious-freedom arguments, so-called parental rights, and calls to “fund students, not systems” as separate prongs in a concerted effort to privatize public schools via school vouchers or educational savings accounts. Little of this will be news to readers, but the authors bring to their argument both passion and pragmatism. It’s hard to resist their urgency: “Efforts to replace public education with a privatized, sectarian, pay-your-own-way model aren’t just aimed at schools—they’re aimed at the larger vision of equality and multi-ethnic democracy.” Even as they sound the alarm, they offer hope, locating it in grassroots organizing and pointing to successful local and statewide resistance to efforts to undermine public schools. They balance lofty idealism—“Schools are often the most inclusive and democratic institutions in our communities....As such, they are seedbeds of democratic life”—with data that supports their argument that privatization results in poor educational outcomes. While the practical promise of the subtitle is never actually realized, readers will come away inspired and, hopefully, energized.
A useful book for all who believe in American democracy.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781620978542
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
A timely, spirited collection.
A compendium of feminist perspectives.
Essayist, memoirist, and fiction writer Gay represents the history, scope, and challenges of feminism in a judicious selection of 65 pieces, some written by iconic feminist writers (bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Susan B. Anthony), others by collectives, and still others by lesser-known voices. Citing “dynamism” as her guiding principle, Gay has chosen works that are articulate, diverse, and hard-hitting. “I believe there is a feminist canon,” Gay writes, “one that is subjective and always evolving, but also representative of a long, rich tradition of feminist scholarship.” The pieces are grouped into eight thematic sections. Foundational texts include a statement of guiding principles for the 2017 Women’s March; early feminist texts begin with 16th-century scholar Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s defense of women’s superiority and includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Anthony’s argument for women’s right to vote. Other well-known pieces include Judy Brady’s wry “I Want a Wife,” a 1970 essay reprinted in the first issue of Ms. magazine; Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me”; and Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate.” There are also fresh surprises: “The Woman-Identified Woman,” a manifesto written by six women calling themselves Radicalesbians, argues that lesbianism is central to feminist politics “as an identity of political, cultural, and erotic resistance to patriarchy.” In “Girl,” novelist Alexander Chee reflects on gender fluidity, remembering being mistaken for a girl when he was growing up and revealing the beauty he finds when he puts on drag. With its capacious perspective, the collection speaks to a range of feminist concerns, past, present, and future. As Gay notes, “women’s bodies, movements, and choices are contingent on the whims of men in power. We have made progress but we are not yet free.”
A timely, spirited collection.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780143110392
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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