Synopses & Reviews
Police officers, armed security guards, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors are common features of the disturbing new landscape at many of today's high schools. You will also find new and harsher disciplinary practices: zero-tolerance policies, random searches with drug-sniffing dogs, and mandatory suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, despite the fact that school crime and violence have been decreasing nationally for the past two decades. While most educators, students, and parents accept these harsh policing and punishment strategies based on the assumption that they keep children safe, Aaron Kupchik argues that we need to think more carefully about how we protect and punish students.
In Homeroom Security, Kupchik shows that these policies lead schools to prioritize the rules instead of students, so that students real problems—often the very reasons for their misbehavior—get ignored. Based on years of impressive field research, Kupchik demonstrates that the policies we have zealously adopted in schools across the country are the opposite of the strategies that are known to successfully reduce student misbehavior and violence. As a result, contemporary school discipline is often unhelpful, and can be hurtful to students in ways likely to make schools more violent places. Furthermore, those students who are most at-risk of problems in schools and dropping out are the ones who are most affected by these counterproductive policies. Our schools and our students can and should be safe, and Homeroom Security offers real strategies for making them so.
Review
“Few issues are more important to parents than school violence. . . . This is research of prime quality that is readable and rigorous on an issue of extraordinary public importance and interest.”
- Jonathan Simon, author of Governing through Crime
Review
“Kupchik's writing is meticulous and even-handed, even praising the officers whose methods he strongly disagrees with.”
- Salon.com
“In his compelling, important book about American schools and discipline, Kupchik, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, punctures the myth that tighter security measures stemmed from Columbine or any other school shooting.”
- Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
“Few issues are more important to parents than school violence. . . . This is research of prime quality that is readable and rigorous on an issue of extraordinary public importance and interest.”
- Jonathan Simon, author of Governing through Crime
Review
"Kupchik provides a compelling and detailed overview of the current discipline environment in today's schools . . . Kupchik builds the case that the recent law-and-order appraoch to student behavior may have many negative consequences, such as developing a population that never questions authority while not accomplishing the goal of keeping students safer."
“Kupchik's writing is meticulous and even-handed, even praising the officers whose methods he strongly disagrees with.”
“In his compelling, important book about American schools and discipline, Kupchik, a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, punctures the myth that tighter security measures stemmed from Columbine or any other school shooting.”
“Few issues are more important to parents than school violence. . . . This is research of prime quality that is readable and rigorous on an issue of extraordinary public importance and interest.”
Review
“The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance.”
-Willis G. Regier,The Chronicle Review
Review
“No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience.”
-The Times Higher Education Supplement,
Review
“The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes.”
-New Criterion,
Review
“Published in the geek-chic format.”
-BookForum,
Review
“Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs.”
-Tricycle,
Synopsis
Naráyanas best-seller gives its reader much more than “Friendly Advice.” In one handy collection—closely related to the world-famous Pañcatantra or
Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom —numerous animal fables are interwoven with human stories, all designed to instruct wayward princes. Tales of canny procuresses compete with those of cunning crows and tigers. An intrusive ass is simply thrashed by his master, but the meddlesome monkey ends up with his testicles crushed. One prince manages to enjoy himself with a merchants wife with her husbands consent, while another is kicked out of paradise by a painted image. This volume also contains the compact version of
King Víkramas Adventures, thirty-two popular tales about a generous emperor, told by thirty-two statuettes adorning his lion-throne.
Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation
For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org
About the Author
Aaron Kupchik is associate professor in the department of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Judging Juveniles: Prosecuting Adolescents in Adult and Juvenile Courts (NYU Press), winner of the 2007 American Society of Ciminology Michael J. Hindelang Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to Research in Criminology.