An incisive examination of failed utopian schemes in the classroom.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Ravitch (The Troubled Crusade, 1983) recounts a dispiriting record of pitched debates and failed reform attempts in the American educational system over the last century.
At the turn of the 20th century, an influx of immigrants and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy compelled a reevaluation of school standards, curriculum, and methods. Two opposing approaches arose on how to deal with the situation. Advocates of liberal education, such as Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, proposed that all students should pursue an academic curriculum. On the other hand, the progressive education movement called for alternatives for non-college-bound students. Inspired by John Dewey, it sought to transform education into both a science and a lever for social reform. But undemanding vocational, industrial, and general programs designed by Dewey’s disciples, Ravitch contends, impaired the prospects of the poor, immigrants, and racial minority groups. An epidemic of educational fads followed—vo-tech schools, IQ testing, child-centered schools, life adjustment, open education, community schools, multiculturalism, the self-esteem movement, even “frontier thinkers” who briefly saw in the Soviet Union an antidote to the competition and striving that underlay both American capitalism and education. Only in conclusion does Ravitch acknowledge that progressive education made valuable contributions in emphasizing children’s motivations and understanding. But with impeccable scholarship and withering logic she demonstrates how, under the influence of this movement, schools lost their focus on their primary teaching mission when asked to solve more social problems than they could handle. In perhaps the greatest irony, progressive educators, claiming the mantle of scientific reasoning, pushed theories related to children’s ability to learn that could seldom be proven definitively.
An incisive examination of failed utopian schemes in the classroom.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84417-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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