Word: hentoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...balance of Does Anybody Give a Damn? is concerned with evidence that schools are "failing." As Hentoff points out, 23 per cent of all students in American public schools fail to graduate from high school, while 43 per cent of all elementary school children are in critical need of reading help. In central Harlem, 87 per cent of elementary and junior high school students fail the standardized reading tests. But this book is neither apocalyptic nor despairing. Hentoff says, "My main interest all along in writing about education has been finding ways in which certain schools can and do work...
...school that Hentoff mentions is P.S. 91, an elementary school in a "disadvantaged" neighborhood of Brooklyn where principal Martin Schor refused to accept the notion that poor children are handicapped in learning to read. Schor's efforts resulted in a dramatic improvement in reading scores--51 per cent of the students were reading above the national norm while in other elementary schools in the same district the percentage was between 20 and 40. Schor's approach, although traditional, placed rigorous demands on his teachers to make sure all students, especially in the critical early grades, were able to read well...
...Hentoff relentlessly drives home his point through a series of fast-paced interviews with a more personable black principal who also turned reading scores around in an intermediate school in New York City, and with a social worker with no formal education whose contagious personal integrity and concern has saved many whom the system usually loses to the street. It is Hentoff's stated intention to "look for schools, principals and teachers" who can enable "even the most 'uneducable' kids to learn." But the weakness underlying the whole book is the question of whether these models can provide universal, "replicable...
There can be no argument with Hentoff's basic beliefs, which a colleague of Martin Schor's capsulizes: "The greatest act of humanity that a principal and his teachers can perform is to enable the children to feel competent when they go out in the world." What is puzzling, however, is Hentoff's attitude towards the radical critique. He writes, "To awaken a Lucy to her intelligence may not help quicken the Socialist Coming, unless she turns out to be a latter-day Emma Goldman. But to save Lucy from believing herself dumb is a most valuable achievement...
Perhaps in Hentoff we see a weathered journalist resenting ivory tower academics, or an honest liberal holding firm, or maybe just a simple personality differing with the cold scholarly writing of Bowles and Gintis. Whatever the problem, there remains a fundamental compatibility between the socialist critique of education--that inequality in education is the direct result of an economic system in which inequality is inherent--and everything Hentoff desires--abolishing socially-sanctioned violence against children in the schools and the crippling of human capabilities by forcing students "to believe they are dumb...