Word: dennison
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...public school. Because the parents of girls from town believe that a woman can live her life with the brains of a hen, only boys attend the school, which the authors acknowledge as "racism." However, like Herbert Kohl's sixth grade children in Harlem or the children in George Dennison's First Street School in lower Manhattan, the students improve when instructional flexibility, Individual encouragement, and a stress on group development are substituted for the rigidity, anonymity, and competitiveness of public schools...
...movement for reform in America's schools has attracted increasing momentum through the 1960s, chiefly thanks to a number of writers like John Holt, Herbert Kohl, and George Dennison who have dramatized areas of inhumane and unthinking practice as well as various attempts at reform in the classroom. Now, "integrated day," "informal school," and "open classroom" have become as familiar as the jargon growing out of the work of John Dewey and the Progressive Movement. Unfortunately, the Progressives left behind little more in practice than jargon. Advocates of reform along the lines of informal schooling fear that without painstaking attention...
Basically Herndon is in desperate agreement with John Holt, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Edgar Friedenburg, Charles Silberman & Co. that U.S. schools are too foolishly over-administered to successfully nurture either reading and writing or the ability to cope humanely with the complex choices of modern life. But unlike most apocalyptic critics, Herndon sees no easy solution. He proceeds, moreover, by meandering parable rather than polemic, and uses a ruefully genial tone of voice that might have come from Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. As a result, he is just about the only education reformer alive whose writing could...
Holt realizes that this kind of school will not be legal or popular for a long time. But eventually some solution in which a child is free to choose his own direction of growth must be adopted. George Dennison concluded the Lives of Children suggesting that it would be economically feasible to make a First Street School run by a teacher and children's parents on every residential block in New York City. Similarly Holt proposes a kind of community organizing to share ideas on education and demand changes in the schools. He also suggests that "student teachers [be given...
...other experts assume the right to make decisions about everybody's children, and then concoct theories and materials which can't fix even the superficial problems of the public schools. Meanwhile those schools, already the most totalitarian institutions in our society, are systematically destroying the souls of children. Dennison tells us that education must focus not on systems and materials but on the lives of individual children, and that it must be located in the communities that care for these children...