Word: dennison
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...NOTED earlier, Dennison's is a drastically different kind of book, His main concern in The Lives of Children is precisely that: to convey the wholeness and meaningfulness of the present lives of children, specifically of the children he worked with at the First Street School a few years...
...Dennison is a gifted storyteller; he somehow allows the reader, in Martin Buber's words, to "imagine the real," the overwhelming total reality of the children's actual lives. As he tells the story of First Street, you live nine-year-old Maxine's ebullience, you share her wondrous obsession with what sex is really about. You live Jose's paralyzing fear and hatred of all things having to do with school; you feel at one moment his absolute uncertainty, at the next his indomitable but anxious pride, at the next the growing sense of security in his relationship with...
...story of the First Street School" is only one of the subtitles of the book; the other is "A practical description of freedom in its relation to growth and learning." Dennison draws many of his abstract conceptions from the actual "jumble of persons and events" at First Street, and others from the writings of Dewey, Tolstoy, and A. S. Neill. What emerges is no narrowly conceived theory of instruction, or non-instruction, but a farseeing and eloquently stated philosophy of education for our times...
...Dennison tells us that the proper concern of the school is not instruction, but the lives of children. He shows how, in his own words, when the conventional routines of a school are abolished (the military discipline, the schedules and rewards, the standardization), what arises is neither a vacuum nor a chaos, but rather a new order, based first on relationships between adults and children, and children and their peers, but based ultimately on such truths of the human condition as these: that the mind does not function separately from the emotions, but thought partakes of feeling and feeling...
That says it all succinctly and elegantly-although Dennison is equally eloquent in his demonstrations and elaborations. If the summary doesn't convince you, all the better-read the book...