The Girl in the Window, by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, translated by Dorothy BrittonWritten by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, a well-known Japanese actress and talk show host, Totto -chan: The Little Girl in the Window was a bestseller when it was published in Japan in 1981. I knew absolutely nothing about this book until I picked it up at a local free library in August 2016 Having worked at the Albany Free School, read Summerhill, earned a master's degree in education, and taught for a decade in a Waldorf school, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find another example of this. heart-centered school. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The story is about a first-year girl, Totto-chan, who is expelled from a traditional Japanese school. His mother discovers the Tomoe school, where Totto-chan flourishes. From a "hyperactive" child calling for street musicians to play at her classroom window, Totto-chan is wholeheartedly adopted into a trendy school of 50 students in grades 1 to 6, where classes take place in old wagons and where love is the primordial method. The book is a memoir of Ms. Kuroyanagi's own experiences, albeit told in story form. Sometimes the chapters veer into more adult explanations of the director's educational beliefs or the dark historical events of the time, but most of the book proved enthusiastically readable. my almost first grader. To a child of the 21st century, this is a book from a bygone era, where the fact that children take the train themselves and have no television is as foreign as the fact that they live as far from Colorado as possible. There's something similar in Chris Mercogliano's Making It Up As We Go Along: The Story of the Albany Free School. Both books use stories to illustrate educational methods. The schools at the center of each book focus on love and freedom. Both schools are small and live on the fringes of acceptable education. While the Albany Free School is the oldest such institution in the United States, Tomoe's school lasted only eight years before being burned to the ground by the B29 bombers that leveled Tokyo in 1945. There is great sadness in this loss and in the fact that the school's principal Sosaku Kobayashi never succeeded in establishing another similar school and died in 1963. It is a great gift that Ms. Kuroyanagi wrote this book to share his experiences. What stands out throughout the book is Mr. Kobayashi's love for the students. Totto-chan's intake "interview" when she first arrives at Tomoe consists of Mr. Kobayashi inviting her to tell him anything she wants. She talks for four hours, until she runs out of things to say. Later in the book, when she has lost her favorite handbag in the latrine toilet and is retrieving it through an access door, the director simply asks her to put back all the sewage that she fished. This book was so successful in Japan because the implicit suggestion is that rigorous academics exclude children like Totto-chan. At the end of the book, there is an epilogue to describe what certain characters have done with their lives. Totto-chan and his classmates have done very well in their lives, achieving success in every way. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Unfortunately, the type of upbringing, even the type of life this little girl experienced.