Blessed with broad vision and focused persistence, Wells (Education/UCLA) cuts to the heart of the school-choice debate by asking the right question (what do we want from our schools?) and by forcing related issues (tax deductions, parent rights, church/state boundaries) to their appropriate corners. After identifying the more popular ideas about educational goals (for the common good, for individual development, and for a more competitive work force), Wells demonstrates how these competing views shape and distort policy formation, and then considers the influences of recent history (e.g., desegregation) on current educational settings. Some of the more successful community responses (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example) satisfy each of the larger goals but at a great cost—fees from transportation and parent-information centers are high. By contrast, programs driven by work-force needs alone, which ignore or even confute democratic outcomes, show less promise. Moreover, although tuition- voucher plans have been debated in many regions, few have been approved by state legislatures. Dogged by funding problems, resource and equity issues, and legal wrangling, these plans have failed to overcome local resistance, to ally with restructuring- movement advocates, or to sort out serious inconsistencies (the call for a set of national standards vs. school-site management and parental-choice priorities). In an often clamorous debate, Wells's levelheaded examination separates philosophical principle from clumsy compromise and redirects the discussion to a more purposeful arena.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8090-3439-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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