Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A model of an “ideal K–12 education.” To be a well-educated child lies not in mastering a canon of concepts or major authors, skills, and subjects. Rather, it lies in the mastery of love. Kenny is the founder of Harlem Village Academies, a network of charter schools, as well as the Deeper Learning Institute, and as singer-songwriter John Legend writes in a foreword to her book, “She reminds us that joy and academic rigor are not opposites….great teaching means helping children learn how to think, not just how to follow.” Kenny illustrates how caring teachers rely on “student discourse, complex questioning, and students taking ownership of their learning.” Her book makes much of how the “highest purpose” of school is “the shaping of the soul, the inner life.” Guidelines for “ethical purpose” and “quality thinking” break out of the book’s pages like tag lines on a PowerPoint presentation. Like many recent manifestos for the mind, the book has a utopian feel: If we could only stop teaching to the text and start learning from the life. Some teachers may find these ideals hard to earn in rooms filled with the hungry and unhoused. “The development of agency requires a shift in school culture as well as an infrastructure of practices,” Kenny writes. “Routines, for example, can teach the skills of self-direction.” The book’s appeal to “Emersonian self-reliance,” however, may not work for those who have relied on others all their lives. Finding your soul and seeking yourself have been the goals of classroom innovators from the Puritans and Louisa May Alcott to John Dewey and beyond. Just how to achieve them will take more than good faith. A breathlessly written plea for the love of teaching and respect for student agency as the heart of classroom education. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.