School for the Age of Upheaval

Young people today know trouble from a host of sources: poverty, sexism and racism; the storms of a climate in turmoil; the loss of loved-ones to incarceration, addiction and suicide. This book is about the role that teachers can play in helping our young people transcend these troubles, honor the pain they feel, and channel their aggression in productive directions. But counseling and anti-bullying programs are not enough. The key is to open up the very content of the curriculum to the emotional life of the whole child.

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., 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., 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., 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., 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.

T. Elijah Hawkes has been a public school teacher and principal for more than two decades, in urban, rural and small town school communities. His writings about adolescence, public schools and democracy have appeared in various books, magazines, and online publications.