Soul Shapers: A Better Plan for Parents and Educators

Are you a soul shaper?

He was shaping young minds-coaxing fledglings to fly-is the most complex job in the world. In this volume, Jim Roy offers a new model for parents and teachers seeking to break out of the rote-memory assembly-line approach to education.

This book offers a method of homing in on excellence in the same way that a blindfolded dolphin seeks a ring tossed into the water. Using echolocation, the dolphin beats an indirect path to the ring, yet every turn, every correction, brings it closer to the goal.

Jim Roy compares the ideas of nineteenth-century visionary Ellen White to those of contemporary educator and psychologist William Glasser. External control, says Glasser, wrecks relationships. You can't control kids. You can teach them to control themselves. Students are led, not bossed. The author shows how a noncoercive approach takes kids beyond grudging acquiescence to self-motivation. Case study stories show how to manage problem children in ways that awaken the mind and arouse the aspirations, shaping them into men and women who are as true to duty as the needle to the pole.

What Monty Roberts (the horse whisperer) does, gently but firmly, with horses, you can do with children. This contemporary application of Ellen White's cutting-edge principles represents a giant step on the journey to educational excellence.