|
|
|
 Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity
Elizabeth Gold
Jeremy P. Tarcher, September 2003
Review by CG Executive Director Jeffrey Pariser:
Elizabeth Gold candidly opens her memoir of the 5 months she spent teaching 9th
graders in a New Visions school in Queens, NY by disclaiming any expertise about
how to fix our public schools. Indeed, Gold, a poet who took the job to pay her
bills, is mostly interested here in describing the chaos in her classroom. Brief
Intervals of Horrible Sanity is largely anecdotal and, depending on your tolerance
level for Gold's smartypants writing style, either entertaining (in a laughing
to keep from crying kind of way) or annoying.
The anecdotes do, however, make the persuasive case for the one reform point
Gold does insist upon: schools' inability to discipline children is destroying
public education. Aside from the impossible learning environment that results,
Gold points out that when teachers spend their days as police officers and social
engineers, "intellectual instruction gets lost in the shuffle." And Gold points
out that many of today's discipline problems result from our insistence on process
rights that allow a few bad apples to ruin the learning environment for everyone:
[P]ublic behavior is at the core of individual rights. For talk about individual
rights if you will – I'm for them. But if there is no sense of group good, you
can't have individual rights, for then the well-connected, the vociferous, and
the selfish will be so intent on having their rights that you won't be able to
have any. (327)
Gold's point is one we have long advocated. A public reconsideration of the role
that individual rights play in our schools is long overdue.
When you buy Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity using the Amazon.com link above, a portion of the profits will go to support
Common Good. | |
