A passionate first-hand account of one man's efforts to reach inner-city youngsters through the written and spoken word. Sent into the New York City public schools by the Teachers' and Writers' Collaborative, short-story writer O'Connor (Rescue, 1989) chronicles his attempts to engage junior high school students in a tough neighborhood with the craft of writing. O'Connor decides to have his students write monologues about real people on issues that touch their lives. He discovers that ``by putting on the voices of other people, they were dealing with their own worst fears and experiences more honestly'' than they could when writing directly about themselves. One series of monologues is based on the notorious Bensonhurst tragedy, in which Yusuf Hawkins, an African- American teen, was shot and killed after inadvertently entering a hostile white neighborhood. The shooting death of two teens in a Brooklyn high school becomes the scenario for another set of monologues. As they take on the various personae in these scenes, O'Connor's students discover fresh, profound avenues of expression. Almost all of them, it's clear, have been touched by violence and are only too familiar with abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, brutality, and homelessness. O'Connor becomes determined not only to offer his students inspiring writing lessons but to somehow transform their lives as well. He prepares his top drama students for auditions for the specialized LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts, but he realizes the limits of what he can accomplish when none of them is admitted. Though overly long and self-indulgent (O'Connor comes across at times as too much the great white savior), with many gratuitous details, this is a valuable reminder that teaching these days involves a great deal more than pedagogy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81186-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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