Another faithful-oppositionist lament over—and explanation of—the wreckage of American college education, this time from English professor Douglas (Univ. of Illinois; All Aboard!, The Smart Magazines, etc.). Citing Thorstein Veblen, William James, and H.L. Mencken, Douglas argues that the seeds of present woe in undergraduate education were sown back in the 19th century when two things happened: The structure of the university came to be modeled on the business corporation (where ``productivity,'' not individual students, is what mattered); and the Ph.D. (``an imported monstrosity'') became the new qualifying badge for professors, causing ``specialization''—instead of general liberal educating— to become the university's commodity of true prestige. These great historical errors went hand in hand with an erroneous but typically American and efficiency-minded view of education as a passive receiving of information rather than (as in the English tutorial system) an intimate nurturing of individual knowledge and judgment. Douglas sees the student revolts of the 60's not as the cause of present-day ills, but as the moment when the already depersonalized universities ``made the complete adjustment to the masses that had arrived since World War II''—when what was left of liberal education ``was pummeled, shrunk, de-toothed if you will.'' As it's left now, the corporate-style university offers little challenge, intimacy, guidance, or enrichment to undergraduates, its own prior hollowness making it easy prey to the self-serving anticanonists, Marxists, multiculturalists, theorists, and Mandarin specialists who may claim to bring reform but in fact bring only more forced- feeding and less liberating of individual minds than ever. Largely anecdotal in method and based on long, observed experience: a plea for simple intellectual honesty and a return of the human dimension in undergraduate education. Passionate, reasoned, and untendentious—easily deserving a visible place on the Crisis-in-the-Colleges shelf.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-124-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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