It Takes a Village to Raise a Child Book by Hillary Clinton Reviews

IT TAKES A VILLAGE
And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.
By Hillary Rodham Clinton.
318 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $20.

Early on in ''It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us,'' Hillary Rodham Clinton recalls an anecdote about a professional football jitney who began training camp every year by holding up a football and announcing: ''Gentlemen, this is a football.'' I kept that story in mind, if out of context, as I sat down to write this review. Even those of us who live far from the centers of power know that this first effort by a highly visible public figure has been launched upon a bounding main of controversy. Merely the reviewer's chore is to focus on the book, to ask what it sets out to do and to say how well that goal is accomplished.

Text:

This, to return the football story to its proper context, is a volume about the basics, for nada could be more basic than the way a nation cares for its children. The championship is taken from the African proverb ''It takes a village to raise a child.'' The hamlet of the present, however, is not the suburb or small town of memory or nostalgia simply the global village, the ''network of values and relationships that support and touch our lives.'' Using stories from her own family unit and her experience as a child advocate, Mrs. Clinton gathers together reports familiar to many of united states of america who work with children, but perchance new to many citizens, which show where the children of today notice themselves.

Mrs. Clinton summarizes studies about how children develop physically, mentally and spiritually, and presents diverse models of the village, or ''civil society,'' taking seriously the needs of children and a social club'southward own responsibility to run into those needs. The models are fatigued from every bit far away equally rural Indonesia and every bit close every bit the local Kiwanis Society. There are folksy reminders of the role each of u.s. needs to play -- ''You tin't scroll up your sleeves and get to work if y'all're notwithstanding wringing your hands'' -- and the bespeak is made frequently and vigorously that every bit a nation, we practise not lack information simply rather the will to do what is best.

In rebuttal to the controversial book on race and intelligence ''The Bell Bend,'' she cites the Abecedarian Project, led by the University of North Carolina psychologist and educator Craig Ramey and begun in the 1970'due south. More than than a hundred low-income black infants, whose parents' average I.Q. was 85, were provided with skillful nutrition and intellectual stimulation in a preschool where specially trained teachers talked and interacted with the children. A ''home-school resources teacher'' met with the parents regularly to help them sympathise the value of talking and reading to their babies and suggesting appropriate ways to play with their growing children. Past the age of iii, the experimental group of children tested 17 points higher on I.Q. tests than the children in the control group. These gains were sustained during years of follow-up report fifty-fifty though the children had gone on to a variety of schools.

''Bear this research in listen,'' Mrs. Clinton says, ''when you heed to those who fence that our nation cannot afford to implement comprehensive early instruction programs for disadvantaged children and their families. If we equally a village decide non to help families develop their children's brains, then at least allow the states admit that we are acting not on the evidence simply according to a different calendar.'' Mrs. Clinton agreeably quotes Mr. Ramey, who says, ''If we had a comparable level of knowledge with respect to a particular class of cancer or hypertension or some other illness that affected adults, you tin can be certain we would exist acting with great vigor.''

So yeah, Mrs. Clinton has certainly offered us a book with a political agenda. But it is an calendar that Americans should find compelling. For what it costs to keep a immature man in prison for a yr, we could have paid his fees at an exclusive private academy. Only there'due south been no great public demand that we send the most disadvantaged of our children to Harvard and throw away the cardinal.

The nigh engaging parts of the book are the glimpses into the personal life of the Beginning Lady and her family. It would be hard for even Senator Alfonse D'Amato not to smile at the moving-picture show of the Clintons assembled afterwards dark on the parking lot of the Arkansas Governor's mansion, throwing a kokosnoot confronting the pavement until information technology cracked, so that Chelsea, who admired the storybook grapheme Curious George, could see what a coconut was like.

For those in the village who devote their lives to children, it is surely heartening to see the detail encouraging examples Mrs. Clinton cites. Problems that seem unsolvable in 1 place have been elsewhere addressed successfully. Reading Recovery, a program that began in New Zealand, takes first graders who are reading poorly and brings nine out of 10 of them to grade level within a few months, subsequently which no further remedial intervention is necessary. Robert Moses, the one-time civil rights leader, developed a method of teaching algebra that has been widely disseminated. The Algebra Project has made a lie of the conventional wisdom that disadvantaged students do not have the innate intelligence to master advanced mathematical concepts. ''Information technology Takes a Village'' is filled with such creative programs, which not but meet the needs of children and their parents but, in the long run, salvage our communities and our nation lives and money.

THE examples Mrs. Clinton uses are taken from many sources. She quotes words of wisdom from William Bennett and the psychiatrist Robert Coles and lauds programs begun under Republican Presidents as well as citing good piece of work done under her husband's administrations in Arkansas and Washington. Information technology is, in brusque, a gathering together of issues and real solutions, framed by stories that are fun to hear and laced with the occasional folksy ascertainment. As readable equally information technology is, though, one wishes that someone had thought the book scholarly plenty to merit an index.

''Children who become unheeded,'' Robert Coles has reminded the states, ''are children who are going to turn on the globe that neglected them.'' Somehow our village must have the gumption to elect to ability and back up those people who share Mrs. Clinton's belief that ''nothing is more important to our shared futurity than the well-being of our children.''

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/13/bsp/19162.html

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