“In Defense of Head Start” could also be the subtitle of this exploration of the preschool program that is one of the few surviving programs of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Mills (This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, 1993) mixes extensive observations at Head Start centers from the inner-city Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles to affluent Montgomery County, Md., with pointed summaries of the history and policies of the program that exemplified the slogan “A hand up, not a handout.” The Watts Towers center is Mills’s home base; for a year, she is a frequent visitor, watching the children master not only colors and numbers in two languages, but brushing their teeth, eating their vegetables, and getting along with their peers. A federally funded program, Head Start has had—and still has—a struggle to maintain its independence and community roots in the face of would-be state and local government takeovers. Despite the infamous third-grade fadeout effect, the program, which began as a summer introduction to school for a few thousand children, has now served more than 15 million children and established the importance of preschool and parent involvement as a precursor to later school success. What differentiates Head Start from other preschool programs even now is its emphasis on health and social services for the children and on parent involvement. The latter is a stumbling block: Many parents whose stories are told here have used Head Start training and job opportunities to establish themselves; other programs struggle to involve parents and the community and recruit adequate staff. Money alone is not the answer, says author Mills in summing up; quality control and a “war on the real causes of poverty” should be new goals. A champion of Head Start brings readers into the classrooms and the homes where the program helps turn foundering families into resourceful citizens. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94328-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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