This book is a very good resource for those who want to know more about Marva Collins and what she was able to do for so many. It is a wonderful resource for teachers

Originally published in 1982 (revised and re-published in 1990), this book tells the story of who Marva Collins is, starting with her childhood and what contributed to her becoming the person she is. The book explains her start as a public school teacher and dealing with the negative politics of schools, then about how and why she opened her own private school where she was freer to use her own teaching methods including the ability to have full control over the curriculums and books she wanted to use.

While working in the Chicago public school system she held her students to a higher standard and taught more difficult material than the school felt was necessary. She felt that children would rise to the level of the teacher's expectations. In times of civil unrest regarding black and white relations, she felt that children from the "ghetto" are indeed teachable. Even the students who have been labeled as having numerous disorders (by school staff) or who are said to have been unteachable, indeed are teachable.

This book tells the story of what Marva Collins believed, the general philosophy is clearly explained. Why she feels a return to the classical education method is a good idea, including why rote memorization of math facts and some other information is explained. She believes a liberal arts education is right for all children of all races and income levels. Her anti-progressive education stance is explained. What specific content she taught and why is there. A good amount of information is given about why she believes that intensive phonics education is necessary and good for all children (and avoiding the look-say / sight reading method). How she taught Shakespeare to young children and her use of the classics and other, more difficult older books is covered. (This is not a curriculum guide for school teachers or homeschoolers to read and copy her method.)

What is not stated that was clear to me is that Collins is a truly brilliant person who used her own knowledge to make many connections within the classroom. Her teaching methods do not rely only on use of certain curriculums but rather depend on the teacher having certain knowledge from their own education and then using that in classroom discussions to make connections between the books and facts that the children were using and what they were learning. In order to teach in the exact way that she does, the teacher must have a foundation of education present, specifically a good liberal arts education herself. Collins realized this was an issue when she first began hiring teachers to work in her private school.

Collins also criticizes many teachers who she feels are uneducated and blames them for not only setting low standards and looking for easy ways to teach but for not being able to have the type of discussions that she has with her students. Collins comes out being quite harsh on public school teachers. Collins' blames teachers for being a main cause of the breakdown of public education. She thinks that some are products of inferior educations themselves, leaving them ignorant and uneducated without a strong foundation from which to teach from. She feels there are teachers who don't know how to teach, who are then subject to various educational fads that clearly are not working (i.e. the look-say method of teaching reading). She also condemns teachers who have low standards about children's abilities as being the issue, feeling children will rise to the level of their expectations.

This is the first book written about Marva Collins. It is a good read to get the beginning of the story and the general background of her theory. She has a second book if you are left wanting more "Ordinary Children, Extraordinary Teachers" is the title.

"Marva Collins' Way" would be of interest to educators who like to read success stories of teachers who do things differently, those who want to or like to buck the status quo or try to stand up to `the education machine' to do what they think is right and best for their students.

Teachers and others interested in charter schools or private schools who have different standards for their students would also like this book.

Anyone interested in the topic of the history of American education or education reform would enjoy this as well.

This will appeal to anyone concerned with the education of inner city, low income level minority children and their experience in public schooling.

Lastly homeschooling parents may learn a thing or two about standards in education and expecting more from students.

At the very least the book is a good read that is inspiring. At its best it may influence you, in whatever role you have with children or education, to raise the standards and to stand up to a failing system in whatever way is applicable in your life.

How I came to read this book: Two years ago a local classical method homeschool support group leader recommended the writings of Marva Collins to me to provide encouragement for having high standards in educational content for children, even young children. I was going through a time when I was being pressured by some homeschooling parents who feel that education should be dumbed down and that little should be expected of elementary grade children. Later another classical homeschooling mother/ blogger whose writing and opinion I respect credited Marva Collins' books as providing inspiration for her educational model for the very same reason. I decided to obtain a copy of Collins' books and I read her first book this month (finally).

The Marva Collins story is an inspiring story of a teacher who was passionate about teaching and excelled through the odds set against her by the school system.

marva collins is such an idol and inspiration for me. she is so full of morals and has a brilliant answer for all of life's problems. get this book if you want to hear the most intelligent things from the most intelligent human being walking the earth! she is HIGHLY underrated as an educator and everything! i really needed to find her b/c as she says, "in this slippery world we all need something to hold onto...." thank you Marva, I love you and God bless you!

I read about 70 pages of the book and unfortunately lost it during my travel. I will be buying this book again. Marva is an extraordinary teacher who has taught me at my middle age that NO CHILD CAN FAIL TO SUCCEED in school. She has achieved this with such re-sounding success that one would want to have a teacher like her for all children in the world. I have no words to express how great the feeling is when you know that every child has all the potential to succeed.

I first read Marva Collins Way several years ago, and have reread it many times since, to help guide and clarify my thoughts about education. She has revolutionized public education, and people's perceptions of it. She has also effectively refuted the growing slew of people in the highest places
of academia who stubbornly cling to long-discedited theories about the intellectual inferiority of certain races in this country. I would recommend this book to anyone, and ask only that you read it at least twice, because it has too much to absorb, to just read it once. It will possibly alter your concept about education, and just who is capable of learning. If you use Marva's concepts as a teacher, I guarantee powerful results!

I first read Marva Collins Way several years ago, and have reread it many times since, to help guide and clarify my thoughts about education. She has revolutionized public education, and people's perceptions of it. She has also effectively refuted the growing slew of people in the highest places
of academia who stubbornly cling to long-discedited theories about the intellectual inferiority of certain races in this country. I would recommend this book to anyone, and ask only that you read it at least twice, because it has too much to absorb, to just read it once. It will possibly alter your concept about education, and just who is capable of learning. If you use Marva's concepts as a teacher, I guarantee powerful results!

I have been re-reading this book (0r parts of it) every year since I first read it in the 1980's -- it is an inspiration to anyone in the teaching profession. I also give it as a gift to the special teachers that I know or that have made a difference in my own childrens' lives.

I am a classical homeschooler. The average person who asks, "How are you teaching your children at home?" has never heard of classical schooling and doesn't want a lecture. But if you say, "Like Marva Collins," their face lights up. For over 25 years Marva Collins has been the most famous teacher in America, yet not one American in a thousand can tell you what her method is called, how to find a local school that uses it, or how to teach that way at home. That disconnection sums up America's educational crisis in a nutshell.

Marva Collins was reared the only child of a wealthy African-American family in segregated Alabama. She learned early on that only three things really mattered: your knowledge, your courage and your willingness to work hard. After graduating from college with a degree in Business, she found the only jobs available at that time to college-educated African-American women were as teachers. She eventually became an elementary school teacher and honed her craft with 14 years of public school teaching.

Marva Collins didn't follow any curriculum. She asked veteran teachers what worked and tested their recommendations in her own classroom. She discarded what didn't work and kept what did work, and what worked for her students was phonics and a "Great Books" approach to learning delivered with large doses of positive reinforcement and lectures on self-reliance, a method that had been named by others "classical schooling."

By the early 1970s the veteran teachers who had trained Marva Collins were retired, and the new administration did not support her intensive learning style. In 1974 the principal abruptly took her own class away from her in the middle of the year. The parents were enraged and the principal was forced to back down, but Marva Collins knew it was time to strike out on her own.

At the urging of neighborhood mothers, Marva Collins began a private school, first in the basement of the local community college, then on the second floor of her house. She started out with a handful of students in what used to be called a one-room schoolhouse and is now called a "cottage school." After a shaky start, the school got good press and good results with their students. New students and donations poured in, and within a few years Marva Collins found herself the principal of a sizeable and highly regarded prep school.

_Marva Collins' Way_ is an inspiration to everyone, but the book has great practical value to classical teachers and homeschoolers. For all the talk about classical methodology there are very few descriptions of how classical schooling can be taught. Half this book contains detailed accounts of events in Marva Collins' classroom, making it by far the most descriptive work I've yet found about classical schooling in action.

Mrs. Collins is a devout Christian, but it might well be that nonChristian parents benefit the most from her method. While her speech to teachers in the appendix is one Biblical allusion piled on top of another, the transcripts of her daily lessons with students show that she uses a multicultural approach which treats the Bible as one Great Book among many. It has been argued that the moral principals at the heart of classical schooling can't be taught without a religious core, specifically without a Christian core. In her classrooms Marva Collins organizes her lessons and her moral principals around a core of Emersonian self-reliance, specifically Getting Out of the Ghetto, instead of a Christian theme. This method could be very helpful to secular parents who wish to use classical homeschooling but who are put off by the relentless Christian focus of much of the available material.

I can find only two criticisms with this book. While Mrs. Collins frequently castigates teachers for the failure of their students, not once in the whole book does she hold principals and the administrative staff responsible for not supporting the teachers. This glaring omission comes in spite of years of research showing that a school's success or failure is directly dependent on the quality of backup teachers receive from principals, a fact that she mentions directly in her preface and that comes through clearly in her autobiography. Decades worth of educational reform have stumbled into that blind spot and failed completely; it's past time to bring it out into the open.

The other criticism I can make about Marva Collins' way is the lack of an organized system for introducing new material. The transcripts make it clear that Mrs. Collins herself doesn't need one. Like James Burke, she is brilliant enough to make the "Connections" between just about anything and just about anything else. But how many other teachers can do likewise? Not many. When I mentioned I was reading this book, a former teacher who had done her student teaching at Marva Collins Prep School mentioned that while she saw children given lots of work she could discern no overall structure being given to them for them into which to organize the information. Perhaps one wasn't available at that time. I know the authors of the classical homeschooling manual _The Well-Trained Mind_ have put out a series of instructional materials that can be used by classical homeschoolers and classrooms; hopefully their work will begin to address that problem.

The one fact that comes through the strongest in this book is that Marva Collins is a saint. She has the stamina, the passion, the higher purpose, the total commitment and the mission of a saint determined to save the hearts and minds of her children from the corrosive effects of the ghetto. Without the vision, drive and charisma of a saint new social movements all too often fail to get off the ground. But I was also reminded of William James speaking of the difference between a saint and a philosopher. The philosopher is the person who analyzes the teaches of the saint and writes them into a creed that the ordinary person can follow. We desperately need a philosopher to analyze Mrs. Collins work and turn it into a system that any halfway competent teacher could follow, so that we can save the rest of the children caught in the maw of the "school system".

This book is sort of like a Chicken Soup for the Soul. It is filled with inspirational stories of Mrs. Collins' successes. She goes against the belief that troubled inner city black students cannot be disciplined and taught. She goes against the theory that more money will help improve inner city schools. She disagrees that public school teachers really put their students first in their lives. She is an advocate of school vouchers. One of the most respected teachers in America tells us what is wrong with our schools and proven strategies that she has used to help some of the worst kids in Chicago. Should be required reading for all teachers.