A first-person account of how a nuclear-powered principal saved a Philadelphia school in a collapsing inner-city neighborhood. Cartwright—the youngest of 13 children who were so poor that they often went without shoes—worked her way through college as a maid, began to teach, and then moved up through the Philadelphia school system, eventually becoming principal of the James G. Blaine Elementary School in Strawberry Mansion (whose pretty name belied its desolate neighborhood: its students saw death and violence, and knew hunger, cold, and desperation). Cartwright set out to make the school a safe and joyous refuge for learning; one of her first acts was to take off her shoes and stockings, drop to her knees, and scrub the foul-smelling floor of the children's bathroom (many similiarly dramatic incidents dot the text, coauthored with Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reporter d'Orso). Cartwright defied or circumvented the school establishment regularly—for example, by insisting that the administering of achievement tests be as clean as the bathroom floor. As a result, the school's achievement scores dropped at first, but then began to climb as the children mastered the concepts and not simply the answers, which had been readily available during the previous school regime. Cartwright was able to turn the school around because, above all, she insisted that teachers respect each child's potential; that children respect their teachers and parents; and that parents be involved in their children's education. As gripping as her school tales are those of the neighborhood's deterioration, of the start of the crack epidemic, and of the benighted efforts of reformers who annually touted new programs to revive the schools. Cartwright rejected most of these efforts and continued on her own way. Few share Cartwright's drive and courage, but her advice to make schools a better place just one step, one room, at a time may hearten all those overwhelmed by grandiose proposals for ``educational reform.''
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42372-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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