A solid guide, as far as it goes.
A practical and thorough primer for high school students preparing to attend college.
The authors, both of whom have taught at American University, help seniors master important life skills and adjust successfully to the first year of college. Topics covered include the expected—academics, health and wellness, time management, finances, internships—as well as ones that teens might not anticipate, such as imposter syndrome, fostering a successful mindset for being a college learner, and appropriate communication with professors. The volume is readable, well-organized, and explicitly claims to address universal needs and concerns. However, much of the advice assumes a middle-class, mainstream background, and first-generation college students, those living at home rather than in a dorm, LGBTQ+ students, students with disabilities, nontraditional students, and students of color may feel overlooked or taken aback by some of the advice, such as to avoid talking about identity and diversity when you initially contact your new roommate. The all-too-brief section on sexual assault unfortunately addresses potential victims, missing an opportunity to educate potential perpetrators. Drug and alcohol abuse are, surprisingly, overlooked. College faculty and staff will appreciate the advice to parents about allowing young people to grow in responsibility. While not as universally applicable as the authors may have intended, this nevertheless contains information of value, particularly in addressing the differences between high school– and college-level academics.
A solid guide, as far as it goes. (notes, index) (Nonfiction. 16-19)Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22518-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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