A cogent collection of essays and academic papers suggesting that multiculturalism in the classroom is an illusion that masks miscommunication and the continuation of a white-male-dominated society. MacArthur fellow Delpit (Education/Morgan State Univ.) is a teacher of teachers. A black woman who grew up in Louisiana in the 1960s and '70s, she experienced prejudice and stereotyping firsthand. But it was her stints as a teacher and observer of students as diverse as preschoolers in New Guinea and Native American teachers-in-training in Alaska that helped her formulate her ideas about the subtle misunderstandings that lead children of color—African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans—to be labeled underachievers. When communication fails between teacher and student, for instance, it may be a question of style. Working-class children, says Delpit, are often used to families where instructions are explicit and direct: ``Get your rusty behind in that bathtub,'' a working-class mother might say to her eight-year-old. ``Would you like to take your bath now?'' is the likely approach of a white middle-class mother. When such ``veiled commands'' are issued by middle-class teachers in the schoolroom, ``other people's children'' are likely to consider them as mere suggestions and continue with their own activities. Lacking explicit instruction about the rules is one reason children not raised in what Delpit calls the ``culture of power''—in white middle-class or upper-class families—quickly abandon schoolbook learning. But Delpit also criticizes teachers who encourage individual expression while offering their charges little or no direction in how to cope in the real world, which is not so tolerant of individualism. On the question of ``black'' versus ``standard'' English, she urges: Teach formal English grammar; teach spelling and literature. They are the tools needed to succeed. But honor the students' traditions, keeping in mind that formal English is only one rather arbitrary method of discourse. Argued with a voice of reason and experience.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56584-179-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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