Books about Schoolteachers from Amazon.com

John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction focuses on mechanisms of familiar schooling that cripple imagination, discourage critical thinking, and create a false view of learning as a by-product of rote-memorization drills. Gatto's earlier book, Dumbing Us Down, put that now-famous expression of the title into common use worldwide. Weapons of Mass Instruction promises to add another chilling metaphor to the brief against schooling.

Here is a demonstration that the harm school inflicts is quite rational and deliberate, following high-level political theories constructed by Plato, Calvin, Spinoza, Fichte, Darwin, Wundt, and others, which contend the term "education" is meaningless because humanity is strictly limited by necessities of biology, psychology, and theology. The real function of pedagogy is to render the common population manageable.

Realizing that goal demands that the young be conditioned to rely upon experts, remain divided from natural alliances, and accept disconnections from the experiences that create self-reliance and independence.

Escaping this trap requires a different way of growing up, one Gatto calls "open source learning." In chapters such as "A Letter to Kristina, my Granddaughter"; "Fat Stanley"; and "Walkabout:London," this different reality is illustrated.

John Taylor Gatto taught for thirty years in public schools before resigning from school-teaching in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal during the year he was named New York State's official Teacher of the Year. Since then, he has traveled three million miles lecturing on school reform.

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Price: $16.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests.  She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind.  Jane Jacobs, Hannah's great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece's remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly.  It is more than an adventure story:  it is a powerful work of women's history that provides important--and, at times, unsettling--insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settler's behavior toward native communities at the turn of the century.  

"An unforgettable...story of a remarkable woman who lived a heroic life."--The New York Times.
Price: $4.74 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Using richly textured case studies of two very different schools, Betty Achinstein shows when teachers enact reforms in the name of community, what often emerges is conflict. Whether dealing with issues of teacher collaboration or how to meet the needs of a diverse student population, conflicts within professional communities reflect important differences of beliefs and practices. This book reframes conflict as constructive in building educational communities that learn and promote democratic values in schools..
Price: $27.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Audrey Purkeypile was born in northern Alaska in 1927 during a remarkable era of Alaskan history. Surrounded by the wondrous beauty of untamed land, Audrey s parents raised their family alongside the affable Eskimos, daring bush pilots, and rugged trappers and gold miners. They contributed to the development of the Territory of Alaska in their diverse roles as teacher, postmaster, health officer, and reindeer superintendent. In this poignant memoir, author Cheryl Schuermann has captured the delightful stories of her mother s childhood in When the Water Runs. Audrey s memories and life lessons learned will provide readers with an inside look at a young girl s experiences as she grows up with Alaska, America s last frontier..
Price: $7.46 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Like the autobiographical hero of this, his classic first novel, Mouloud Feraoun grew up in the rugged Kabyle region of French-controlled Algeria, where the prospects for most Muslim Berber men were limited to shepherding or emigrating to France for factory work. While Feraoun escaped such a fate by excelling in the colonial school system -- as a student and, later, as a teacher at the Ecole Normale -- he remained firmly rooted in Kabyle culture. This dual perspective only enhanced his view, often brutally, of the ravages on his country by poverty, colonial rule, and a world war that descended on Algeria like a great storm. This embattled society, and Feraoun's unique position within it, became the raw material for The Poor Man's Son. Originally published in 1950, the novel was reissued in 1954, when its style was "fixed" to remove colloquial mannerisms and tenses. Perhaps more importantly, an entire section was omitted, significantly altering the conclusion and, indeed, the whole thrust of the book. Nonetheless, it is this version by which the book is known to this day in French. Based on the original 1950 text, this new translation is notable not only for bringing Feraoun's classic to an English-speaking audience but also for presenting the book in its entirety for the first time in fifty years. A direct response to Albert Camus' call for Algerians to tell the world their story, The Poor Man's Son remains after half a century the definitive map of the Kabyle soul..
Price: $13.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A funny and all-too-familiar story that will delight anybody who has a hard time looking forward to Monday mornings


Steve was fed up. He was fed up because it was Sunday and because
that meant tomorrow was Monday and because that meant SCHOOL!

What is good about Sundays? Walking the dog, splashing in puddles, visiting Auntie Vera, and yummeroony food, for starters. But Steve still can’t help having the Sunday Blues. He knows that Monday morning is right around the corner - and can anything good happen on Mondays?.
Price: $1.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]