An impassioned plea for inspiring education. It’s up to educators to act.
Much-needed systemic change starts in schools.
After acclaimed British educator Ken Robinson died in 2020, his daughter, Kate, resolved to honor his legacy by creating this volume, a distillation of his core ideas about how to reimagine education and schooling so that young people could flourish. “Dad’s work,” she writes, “was a love letter to human potential.” Education reform is central to Robinson’s exhortation for a wide-reaching revolution that “calls for a global reset of our social systems” and a “new, wider conception of human ability, and an embrace of the richness of our diversity of talents.” This revolution is urgently needed in order to face a rapidly changing world and an increasingly vulnerable planet. “As a species,” he writes, “we have progressed to the point where many of our systems are now outdated or entirely obsolete. The good news is that it is within our powers to do something about it.” Comparing current schooling to industrial farming, Robinson critiques education that is focused on disciplinary distinctions, a narrow definition of intelligence, and learning that is assessed through testing. He believes “there is no such thing as an academic subject, only academic ways of looking at things. It is not what is being studied, but how it is being studied.” Education should promote young people’s engagement with the world around them as well as the world within them; improve their understanding of their own cultures and respect for the diversity of others; and give them resources to become economically responsible and independent and “active and compassionate citizens.” To achieve these goals, Robinson identifies eight core competencies: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure (“a sense of personal harmony and balance”), and citizenship. Rather than offer a blueprint for reform, Robinson urges teachers, parents, policymakers, and students themselves to imagine a school ecosystem that empowers, encourages, and nurtures all of its participants.
An impassioned plea for inspiring education. It’s up to educators to act.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-14-313416-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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