Lacks the muckraking that characterizes much of Kozol’s oeuvre, but solid nonetheless.
Back to school with America’s most inspiring education advocate.
National Book Award–winner Kozol (The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, 2005, etc.) assumes the role of avuncular mentor in this winsome yet passionate collection of letters to Francesca, a brand-new teacher in inner-city Boston. The epistolary format, though somewhat disjointed, allows Kozol to range widely as he recalls his own first days of teaching and offers vignettes about the children he’s known over the years. He knocks education degrees and vouchers, assesses the fad of breaking up large high schools into “mini-schools” and gives advice about how to work patiently with those kids who are determined to hate and disrespect their teachers. Each letter to Francesca is studded with insights. Today’s obsession with tests and “proficiency” comes in for some of Kozol’s saltiest castigations, as do the teachers who bow before them. “Teachers have to find the will to counteract this madness,” he writes, because “abject capitulation to unconscionable dictates from incompetent or insecure superiors” will only teach children to likewise capitulate. Kozol also addresses the tricky relationships among teachers, principals and parents. Schools often blame parents for kids’ problems, but the schools themselves—from the demeanor of administrators to the imposing buildings themselves—subtly suggest parents are not welcome participants in their children’s education. Many themes from Kozol’s earlier books are reprised here, including his diehard defense of public education and his insistence that those public schools have become re-segregated. Indeed, he repeats approvingly Francesca’s comment that the word “diversity,” a favorite of education pundits, “has come to be a cover-up for situations to which it can’t possibly apply”—i.e., public schools with 3,000 students of whom six or seven are white. Solutions? More money and a large supply of clear-thinking, dedicated teachers like Francesca who can turn the system around.
Lacks the muckraking that characterizes much of Kozol’s oeuvre, but solid nonetheless.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-39371-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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