Puts human faces on the often impersonal and obscure college-admissions process.
New York Times education reporter Steinberg demonstrates that character is not always fate for the students who apply to elite Wesleyan University.
“Here is what American society looks like today. A thick line runs through the country, with people who have been to college on one side of it and people who haven't on the other.” The author takes this quote from Nicholas Lemann, who wrote a sobering study of the SAT (The Big Test, 1999), as the starting point for his microscopic examination of the how Wesleyan, a prestigious liberal arts institution in Connecticut, composed its Class of 2004. Running with Lemann's thesis that higher education in the US is the great determinant of class and social mobility, Steinberg takes a disparate group of high school seniors, from a cinephiliac Native American male in New Mexico to a relatively privileged female at L.A.’s prestigious Harvard-Westlake private school who has one damaging incident with pot in her record, and follows the fate of their applications through the decisions of Wesleyan's “gatekeepers,” the admissions officers. The clashing points of view of the students and the college form a tragicomic undercurrent here. One factor in particular influences Wesleyan’s admission process: the need to rank high in such influential compendiums as The US News Guide to Colleges. Since these texts rate schools partly on the number of students they refuse, Wesleyan, like other colleges, has created a mechanism for generating many more applications than it can possibly accept. Admissions officer Ralph Figueroa, whom Steinberg shadowed for this study, spends half of his year selling Wesleyan and the other half rejecting most applicants. What shines through in the portrait of Figueroa and his colleagues is their utter commitment to a Herculean, if somewhat paradoxical, task.
Puts human faces on the often impersonal and obscure college-admissions process.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03135-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
