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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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