Customer Reviews

Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools

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First, ignore the author's early forays into post-modernism. Second, forgive him for relying unduly heavily on minimally trained graduate students for most of his field work. Given these two conditions, this is a really valuable book.

Twelve years after Maximum Security was written, it may seem obvious that adolescents join gangs, offer an actively menacing countenance, and are sometimes violent simply because they have to be to survive in America's inner city schools. In 1997, however, this was an illuminating observation that explained a great deal. Devine made clear, moreover, that it was not the organization and functioning of schooling itself which engendered a culture of violence, but that it was a contextually determined phenomenon, inevitably imported from the outside, about which schools could do very little.

Devine also clarified the socially determined role of the teacher in lower-tier inner-city schools where a culture of violence prevails. Teachers cease to be involved in students' lives. They close the doors to their classrooms and, as best they can, impart specific subject matter. The whole student is no longer their concern, because an holistic approach involves contact with too many outside sources of real danger.

Devine's account of the hopelessness that comes with being relegated to a lower tier school is familiar, reminiscent of the massive literature on school stratification and its pernicious effects. Though the social costs of educational stratification are well known, however, Devine makes clear that it still pervades big-city schools such as those he studied in New York.

A welcome but unexpected observation concerns bigness itself. When several thousand students with very limited prospects are concentrated in one school, opportunities for parental and neighborhood involvement are, for all practical purposes, eliminated. Schools become large holding tanks, suffused with fear, normatively chaotic, and devoid of regulation by any wholesome notion of belonging to a nurturing community.

So, if we ignore Devine's efforts to make post-modernism useful and forgive him his methodologically dubious approach, we can learn a great deal about big-city schooling. Anyon's Ghetto Schooling, published in the same year as Maximum Security, is a useful complement to Devine's work.

Some background of John Devine would be most relevant to be placed in "about the author" within Amazon's website -- his own upbringing of disciplined learning is in stark contrast to today's teenager. This book is a 'must' for any parent, let a lone teacher.