Word: dennison
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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...
...Dennison is acutely aware of the differences between philosophical though and "mere intellection," and he includes as evidence a bristling but rather insubstantial critique of Bruner. Some of his points, however, are well worth noting: that educational experts like Bruner (and now Jones) are concerned not so much with the education of the young as with the improvement of the schools, not so much with instructing children as with manipulating them. Much more intriguing in this vein are Dennison's accounts of how "freed" children develop organic and highly structured codes of order and morality; how they come to respect...
...First Street School eventually closed down, because Dennison and his colleagues could not sustain their interest in it. He takes his lesson from that too. The Appendix of the book includes extensive advice on how to establish and run a school like First Street. Dennison prefaces this advice with the following statement in the last chapter...
...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...