A feel-good story with a predictable outcome—but Kersjes tells some hard truths along the way.
The inspirational account of a special-education teacher in a small-town high school who overcame great obstacles to bring his class to NASA’s space camp in Huntsville, Alabama.
According to Kersjes, special education is the ghetto of public schooling. Regular staff look down their noses at those who teach the learning-disabled or emotionally impaired; tormented by classmates, the students themselves are aware of their inferior status. Assisted by New York–based journalist Layden, Kersjes conveys indignation but also an admirable dedication to his work. Not that he ignores its difficulties: his students are described with genuine affection, but it’s clear that many have unattractive problems and are often genuinely obnoxious. They have suffered a raw deal from life, Kersjes demonstrates, but they retain the potential to straighten out. When he proposes to send them to space camp—an intense week-long program aimed at gifted kids and packed with hands-on demonstrations, scientific competitions, and simulated space-shuttle missions, with every class ranked on the final day—his students love the idea, but his superiors hate it. NASA officials give it the brush-off too, but Kersjes persists. An amazingly helpful congressman twists a few arms, and approval soon follows. Raising $50,000 for expenses seems impossible when dozens of grant requests are rejected, but finally a rich businessman opens his checkbook. Then come months of intense classroom education in science and rocketry; Kersjes prays that his kids’ performance will not compare too badly to that of the gifted classes and that the stress will not provoke anyone to behavior that would disgrace the group. To his delight, the students perform brilliantly. Final scoring places them near the top, and they return home in triumph.
A feel-good story with a predictable outcome—but Kersjes tells some hard truths along the way.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27314-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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