Both personal and historical, this is a welcome book on the importance of education for all.
Elevating the thinking around school improvements, from the nuts-and-bolts ideas to a broader view.
Most parents, teachers and others involved in the education of children and teens would agree that nearly every school could use improvement in certain areas. There are, of course, dozens of useful books on the education shelf, but Buzbee (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History, 2006, etc.) provides a bracing rejoinder to the didactic, data-driven books from policy gurus and social scientists. Where other authors draw on research studies and have specific case studies that serve as the frosting on the cake, the author starts from his own experience and leapfrogs back in time to explore various educational practices and their origins. The blackboard itself was invented back in 1800. Students were using their portable blackboards to practice writing and arithmetic in school and at home when George Baron thought to connect a series of them on the wall to teach broader and more complex formulas to a larger audience of students. Buzbee writes of the different views of the teacher in the front, from the “lecturing chalk-and-talk” droners who fail to reach students to those who serve as “a lens through which the lesson is created and clarified.” From the layout of schools to the distinction between “middle school” and “junior high school,” Buzbee spreads engaging prose across the pages, providing both a reminiscence of better days and a considered examination of the assumptions we all make about what does—and does not—constitute a quality education. In the epilogue, he offers a series of proposals, noting the importance of raising teacher salaries—and yes, even if that means raising taxes. “And to prove my seriousness, let me be the one to say it first,” he writes. “You may read my lips: Raise my taxes!..you can raise my taxes through the roof…raise them to Swedish levels, to ‘socialist’ levels.”
Both personal and historical, this is a welcome book on the importance of education for all.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55597-683-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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