Can we have more teacher/intellectuals in our classrooms? This book demonstrates that we can. But many things have to change before intellectual standards appear again in public schools. David Owen attempts to show, but not in outline form, how we can revise our schools. Can we escape the rut in which public education finds itself, dominated by the inane (tests), the stifling (reduction of school to job training), and the insane (transformation of a life-affirming odyssey of the mind to clichés, information gathering, and slogans)? We can reclaim the beauty of an education if we join David and re-vise our classrooms. Education is uncertain, risky, wonderously adventurousyet schooling has become stale. Notediously dreadful. There is a need to revise. Reject standardized tests! Repeal pay for performance! Eject No Child Left Behind before no child has a thoughtful mind left. It is time to revise, and Davids book explains why. Are we still interested in the mind, soul, and substance of the individual? Does it matter who we are and become, or just what we do? If these questions still matter, dwell carefully with Davids ideas and transform yourself, your students, school, community, state, nation, and world. It is time to revise them all. John A. Weaver, Georgia Southern University

Acknowledgments; 1 For|word ; 2 Each Morning is a Gift: Poetry and the Need for Revision in Public Education ; 3 Singing the Song of the Open Road: Walt Whitman and Curriculum; 4 Asking Big Questions in Small Spaces: Ethics, Literature, and the Classroom; 5 The Story is the South: Literature and the Exploration of Place; 6 The Useless Studying the Useless: Aesthetics in Contemporary American Education; 7 Living Beyond: St. Paul, Romanticism, and the Doors of Artistic Perception; 8 Time for Some Feedback: A Curricular Defense of the Pop Song; 9 Ill Communication; 10 The Word is Dead; Long Live the Word: Literature in the Digital Age; References