The author speaks on these issues across the country, and his text occasionally sounds like a lecture. Nonetheless, this...
An advocate for the rights of people with learning, physical or emotional disabilities takes a road trip in the vehicle that symbolizes the way we segregate those who are different.
Labeled as learning disabled in the third grade (he had attention deficit disorder and dyslexia), Mooney grew up riding the “short school bus…once used to take kids with disabilities to special ed programs.” He was a special-ed success story: Though unable to read until age12, he later graduated with honors in English from Brown University. But he didn’t want to be seen as someone who had “overcome” his disability and become “normal”; he traveled cross-country in one of those little yellow buses to declare his solidarity with members of the minority who ride in them and to offer some lessons for the rest of us. Learning disabled Brent lobbed paintballs at him in Albuquerque; deaf-blind Ashley cussed him out in sign language in Richmond. He met Cookie, a big guy who wore a blonde wig and a pink robe; sweet Katie, who had Down syndrome; bipolar Sara; and Asperger Jeff. All, Mooney insists, are singular people—though every one of them addresses him as “dude” and uses “man” as a form of conversational punctuation. (They’re also all given, at least in his account, to pronouncing wise aphorisms they’re unable to clarify.) As well as describing trips to Graceland and Burning Man, Mooney provides some social history of the efforts through eugenics and pseudoscience to “fix” or to set apart people who may be different. No one is precisely normal, he reminds us; that’s a statistical concept and a social construct.
The author speaks on these issues across the country, and his text occasionally sounds like a lecture. Nonetheless, this offers a heartfelt rebuke to rigid definitions of normality.Pub Date: June 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7427-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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