Official Review: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the Ame...

[GKCfan]

[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America" by Mel Hawkins.]

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-first Century America by Mel Hawkins is a non-fiction study of the current state of public education in America, the problems crippling American schools and students, and also some suggestions as to how to fix these issues.

Hawkins has a lot of experience with teaching, and he frequently draws upon his own career in order to buttress his arguments and suggestions as to how to create better schools. Hawkins provides some very interesting suggestions as to how teachers can better motivate their students, and he calls for some innovative new approaches to teaching, grading, testing, and advancing students.

Some of Hawkins’s proposed solutions include tailoring lesson plans and expectations to individual students, changing standards as to the rates that children ought to learn, promote more collegial relationships between faculty and students, and stressing success over failure. These are just a sampling of the thirty-three “action items” Hawkins suggests in order to improve America’s public schools.

One of Hawkins’s most interesting points is the role of race in education. Frequently, minority group students claim that it is “culturally inauthentic” to succeed in school, and they often refuse to perform assignments because they believe they don’t need to learn that information because it has no relevance in their life. Furthermore, attempts to force them to learn or attempts to discipline them academically are attacked as racism. Hawkins points out that these prevalent cultural attitudes need to be addressed if education is to improve.

When Hawkins draws upon his own experiences as a teacher and other teachers’ experiences, his work is very solid. It’s when he starts to make some grand, sweeping statements about American history and the state of the world that some reservations arise. For example, at one point Hawkins bemoans his belief that America’s public discourse regarding politics has degraded into fierce animosity. While the availability of twenty-four-hour cable news and the Internet have made political talk more accessible, even ubiquitous, the widely expressed perception that the civility of political debate has coarsened does not really hold up to historical scrutiny. In one famous example, one of John Adams’s political rivals referred to him as “a blind, bald, crippled, toothless man who is a hideous hermaphroditic character with neither the force and fitness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” There are many more examples of how angry rhetoric and personal attacks are an American political tradition rather than a recent blemish, but I just wanted to cite one of the most memorable.

Other passages connected to students and attitudes in other countries are open for debate. I have read other reports and articles contradicting some of Hawkins’s assertions about other countries’ attitudes towards education and success, as well as other reports providing much more nuance and scrutiny into the potential problems children from single-parent households endure, but I am not enough of an expert to say who is right and who is wrong. Other issues as to why American students’ test scores compare unfavorably to those of other nations need further scrutiny. In other countries, only the best students take certain test used to rank countries by nation, whereas in America nearly all students take the tests. Educators in other highly-ranked nations have also complained of a “culture of cheating” that throws off accurate rankings.

I often found myself nodding and agreeing with Hawkins, but I frequently felt compelled to argue with his conclusions and suggestions. My own background in education makes me think that Hawkins needs to do more to understand why so many private schools work as well as they do, for their success comes from more than just good funding and concerned parents. Hawkins also makes no mention of the sexual abuse crises in many public schools, which cause an unknown number of students to drop out or suffer academically due to predatory teachers. I could– and would like– to discuss and debate this work with Hawkins. He comes across as a very thoughtful man who really cares about students and education. With more educators like Hawkins, America’s school system would be vastly improved, and everybody who cares about educating America’s children owes him a debt of thanks for writing this book.

Would the suggestions Hawkins make save American public education? I don’t know, and therefore my review should not be viewed as an endorsement of Hawkins’s ideas, but rather as an appreciation of his work and a belief that his theories ought to be allowed to enter the public discourse on how to solve the problems with America’s public schools.

I rate this book three and a half out of four stars.

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