If you are concerned about the practice and the prospect of democratic education, then you must read T. Elijah Hawkes. Hawkes makes that duty a great pleasure with an elegant, erudite prose style that deftly applies years of teaching and administrative experience to the vexing problems of public education. Hawkes demonstrates the power of compassionate understanding and rigorous maturity in narratives of school life. His evocations of daily life in public school provide rich insights into the experience of teaching and learning. Hawkes has the compassion to see each child as an individual; he has the courage to understand the implications of each event for his own work as a school leader; and he has the wisdom born of many years of reading and study to describe the path from current problems and failures to the future health of democratic education.
School for the Age of Upheaval brings to jagged relief the struggles of American adolescents in our time of anxiety and inequity. With a unique and powerful prose, T. Elijah Hawkes stirs us with the stories, poetry, and voices of his yearning and despairing students. Fortunately, Hawkes also provides us with key insights from his experience as an educational leader, from which city schools and rural communities can draw to successfully support, teach, and heal our teenagers as they transition from childhood to adulthood.
It isn’t a superficial “strategy” that Elijah Hawkes is offering us—a useful strategy for handling “those” kids. What this book reminds us is that what all of us need is unfaked respect and even love. It's all about trust. Elijah Hawkes narrates beautifully what it takes to build trust as the foundation for courageous teaching.
Every page speaks to us about what we must do above all in our schools if democracy and equality (which must go hand in hand) are to be truly lived.. .. Hawkes’s work has always been relevant, needed, and unusual in its sensitivity to issues that arise in schools and society, including racism and much more. And he knows how to write in a language that speaks to us both movingly and urgently.. .. Hawkes plays with all these big ideas through actual stories based on his experiences as a teacher and principal of adolescents, the latter in both urban New York City and rural Vermont. I can’t get enough of the book, and I suspect many of you will read it with the same pain and pleasure that I did. Over and over again.
Schools: Studies in Education
With an eye trained especially on troubled adolescents, Elijah Hawkes writes movingly of a generation denied 'a mature cultural inheritance' and proposes a schooling that can heal the wounds and open new possibilities for a more compelling education and a healthier society. This is must reading not just for teachers but for all who seek a new, more progressive direction in education.
School for the Age of Upheaval, provides vitally important, frontline-deep-insight into the anger, depression, anxiety, violence, and pain of America's youth. That insight is beautifully framed by a caring, experienced, and uniquely both urban and rural leading American educator. Educators will immediately recognize the truth in the raw reality of the trauma and search for meaning and power our students communicate everyday. Non-educators get a genuine under-the-hood explanation of all that American adolescent confusion, posturing and pain, paired with direction on what can and needs to be done about it. This book reaches into the abyss of shallow culture and broken communities to provide a frontline explanation of the pain and posturing that both our American rural and urban youth are expressing as they attempt to find authenticity, meaning, and something real to hold onto.
Politically conscious educators are deeply motivated to develop the leadership of young people, with the hopes of building a more just democracy—and yet, like all educators, they are so often demoralized and devalued in their work. School for the Age of Upheaval is an offering to sustain their teaching and celebrate their contributions. Elijah Hawkes subverts deficit-model thinking by laying out how youth are developing new strategies for digesting what they’re presented with—whether the messages of religion, of the street, or social media. Young people are not passive victims, and we can find hope in the evidence and thoughtful analysis in this book. Adults can find it difficult to comprehend what today’s children and young people are going through. It can feel like too much for our hearts and minds when we consider what today’s youth have to process, filter, and absorb, but Hawkes tells these stories so that our hearts and minds are fed while we consider the real and figurative sea change we’re living through.
T. Elijah Hawkes is a gifted writer and a powerful story teller. He also is one of the most radical thinkers in the United States. Why? Saying that teachers and students should be empowered, this is something we have heard for decades, and we have heard that for decades because it is only rarely done. The implications of such empowerment are not lost upon those who prefer the status quo. School for the Age of Upheaval provides the theoretical framework, and the practical tools, to empower a school and transform a society.
Clear-eyed and visionary, School for the Age of Upheaval is a powerful call to action and reflection. If schools are where the next generation is either crushed or comes alive, this book is a vivifying force! Hawkes is unflinching in his diagnosis of the pain and violence enacted by and on our youth, and stubbornly hopeful and pragmatic about what we can do about it. He pours over twenty years of experience from New York City to rural Vermont into these pages, foregrounding the experiences of teens whose personal upheavals intersect with the social upheavals that are confronting us all. School for the Age of Upheaval maps a way forward that is pragmatic and bold, a Courageous Curriculum that does not deny or pacify the anger and disillusionment expressed by young people, but acknowledges and channels it into a positive force. Beautifully written and passionately argued, this is a book that every teacher, administrator, public official and parent should read, not once, but as an ongoing tool to help realign everyday practices in our schools with a broader vision of education as a site of social transformation.
