Customer Reviews

Schooling for Humanity: When Big Brother Isn't Watching

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I've known David Solmitz since he was a small boy whose father was a professor at Bowdoin College - but even if I hadn't, his book would still fill me with awe at the blazing honesty and courage of his will to teach humanness, justice and tolerance in a small mid-Maine town whose history is one of the hard, too often violent lives of farming, lumbering and small business.

David makes no bones about his trepidation in tackling the monumental task of weaning his students away from the worst aspects of the region's prevailing culture of knee-jerk class/race/religious prejudice, authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism! This is a town that still tolerated a branch of the KKK at the time of World War II - not against blacks, but against the "niggers" of Maine - French Canadian Catholics!

As a teacher in the high school, David not only taught Social Studies, but lived it as well, defending students from poor working class families against brutal stereotypy and even occasional violence from the dominant class of students and their hangers-on, encouraging them to defend themselves, creating a forum for discussion of home-grown race/class issues - and thereby getting himself in occasional hot water with his supervisory personnel - and in general, practicing what he preached, thus serving as an adult model to his students not solely based on pleasing the local Rotarians or Elks.

I have only two regrets about this splendid book - the print is too small for comfort, and it is too expensive(...) thereby potentially limiting its exposure to college classes in small, elite colleges like Goddard.

David's book is an important, inspiring read that should be required in all teacher education universities. It is comprehensive and comprehenable in looking at the history of education. David's democratic quidelines offer hope for the future of our schools.