A combative tone informs a forthright argument for the importance of sparking students’ motivation.
An educator recalls his struggle to define true learning.
In a candid, often bitter memoir, Wagner (Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, 2012, etc.), a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and former high school teacher, principal, and professor of teacher education, offers a harsh critique of schooling—traditional and nontraditional—that he claims quashes students’ love of learning. Most of his schooling was stultifying: He felt like an “outlier” at the small, coeducational, private elementary school that he attended; an all-boys middle school was worse. Disaffected and defiant, he earned such bad grades that he was not invited back for high school. Instead, his parents sent him to a boarding school where one frustrated teacher shouted at him, “you’re always gonna be a fuckup,” an admonition that haunted him throughout his life. Wagner’s demanding, unsympathetic parents tried yet another school—“a ‘last chance’ school,” he soon discovered—where a kind English teacher encouraged his creative writing ability. Overall, though, his teachers were unable “to help me make sense of myself and the world around me.” After dropping out of two colleges, Wagner found the Friends World Institute, which allowed students to travel the world to study social issues. That pedagogy reminded him of Summerhill, an experimental learning environment where children followed their interests without restrictive requirements or formal classes. Friends World endorsed Wagner’s independent program to examine education that “supported individual’s strivings for growth and self-development.” The author reached the epiphany that “having an interest wasn’t enough. You also have to develop the muscles of self-discipline and concentration needed to pursue your interest and deepen your knowledge and understanding.” Graduate study proved as disappointing as earlier educational experiences, and he deems the classes he took at the Harvard Graduate School of Education “a complete waste of time.” As a teacher and administrator, despite his good intentions, Wagner suffered failures, which he blames on overconfidence and teacher resistance; eventually, he joined and led several educational reform projects.
A combative tone informs a forthright argument for the importance of sparking students’ motivation.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56187-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
