When Toor bemoaned the qualifications of those who sit in judgment, she could have been looking in the mirror.
A boorish, cynical look at the college-admissions process, from a former admissions officer (with only three years’ experience).
Toor, a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, is not a fan of the way candidates are screened by colleges—in her case, Duke University. She’s disturbed by the inequities, the class bias, and the ability of some students to buy their way in, not to mention the questionable qualifications of the judges. Here, she details the procedures by which Duke and, by extension, other colleges and universities, make their decisions about who gets the thin envelope and who gets the fat one. What strikes the reader, though, and surprisingly, is the amount of personal attention each application receives, from an evaluation of the quality of their high-school record to the attentive reading of their essays. This admissions department humanizes what might have been an enormously impersonal process. But Toor focuses on the less attractive elements of the process—“The reason we do recruiting is to get the BWRKs [bright, well-rounded kids] to apply so that we can deny them and bolster our selectivity rating”—and insinuates her own little mean-spirited commentary: of the pool of Asian students, “they were much of a muchness.” Some of her advice is sensible: be yourself, write your essay about what comes from the heart. Other comments feel insincere: She goes on about how elite schools are not the last thing in education, but mentions her Yale pedigree no fewer than a dozen times. Cruelest of all is having a kid’s entire life summed up in a telegraphed half page, with a jaundiced sensibility casting an aspersion here and poking fun there, then deeming the application wanting and tossing it on the reject pile.
When Toor bemoaned the qualifications of those who sit in judgment, she could have been looking in the mirror.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28405-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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