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BOOK REVIEW          STOKES
  
It is worthy of note that this study not deal with university teacher-training as an education component. Overlooked is the fact that professors are teachers of morality through their disciples and beyond.
   
This reader wonders whether the Jencks' book, though it raises a basic problem for future social policy development, has not in that attempt emasculated the schools, so much part of the social system, imperfect as it is, but so necessary to help bring about equality of opportunity in America.

Olivia Pearl Stokes


MUST READING FOR PARENTS AND EDUCATORS

THE THIRD SIDE OF THE DESK: HOW PARENTS CAN CHANGE THE SCHOOLS. By Hannah S. Hess. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 324 pages. $8.95

HANNAH HESS'S The Third Side of the Desk is an extremely important and valuable book for parents and educators concerned with current problems and events in public education. It is a book which helps to illustrate the means whereby parents and educators can work together to improve the quality of local educational programs.
   
One of Ms. Hess's main concerns is with the roles of parents, and the dynamics of parent involvement in the process of developing effective changes in the educational programs which so intimately affect their children's lives, programs which in many cases have resulted in failure rather than yielding the successes children rightly deserve.
   
Many parents involved in the long struggles for improved education in the New York City public schools will be able to readily identify with the author's description of the state of many of the City's public schools. Another unique quality of The Third Side of the Desk is the manner in which the author has detailed the struggle and process for change in the elementary school she was involved in as a parent and community participant. Granted that the events detailed in this narrative occur within one elementary school in Manhattan's West Side community, there are many similarities of experience which transcend ethnic, class, and geographic lines, lending applicability to many other situations in urban, suburban or rural schools. 
                
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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 16:34:23