Even so, these are mostly sound essays illuminating how the media’s coverage of juvenile crime has led to blanket policies...
An analysis of the “zero tolerance” policies often implemented in today’s schools, and the ways these policies have disproportionately affected black and Latino students.
“Zero tolerance” initially meant that any student bringing a gun to school would be expelled for up to two years. In many schools, however, the policy has come to cover not only realistic replicas of firearms and knives, but objects that, by virtue of their shape or design, could cause any physical harm, or even give the appearance of being able to do so. It is this nebulous wording that has the editors worried. William Ayers (A Kind and Just Parent, 1997), Dohrn (director, Children and Family Justice Center/Northwestern Univ.), and Berkeley High School teacher Rick Ayers argue that the rates of school punishment for black students exceed rates for white students. Clear examples in support of their theory are periodically given: A white student in Vermont was neither suspended nor expelled for bringing a loaded shotgun to school, while an African-American student in Rhode Island was suspended for offering to dislodge a computer disk with a penknife. At other times, the authors’ rhetoric misses the mark: When six African-American students expelled for fighting try to return to their campus illegally, the situation is likened to “the 1957 placement of National Guard troops at Central High School in Little Rock.” One wishes the editors had declared zero tolerance for purple prose: “Tears moistened the principal’s eyes as she watched the axe fall on twelve-year-old Arturo, a student she had known since she first became the principal of the elementary school on Chicago’s South Side.”
Even so, these are mostly sound essays illuminating how the media’s coverage of juvenile crime has led to blanket policies that can make little sense.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-666-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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