A whimsical, informal account of American university life as it now stands. Matthews (Journalism/New York Univ.; Where the Buffalo Roam, 1992, etc.) structures her book as a journey through the academic year. It runs from summer to summer, beginning with a look at how colleges and universities make their (often undignified) pitch to high-school students and ending with a reunion of old-timers at Princeton. The author's ambition is sweeping. She aims to touch on all kinds of four-year institutions, leaving no part untouched: student drinking, faculty salaries, academic standards, tenure, mathematicians who dress funny, and so forth. The result is an entertaining glimpse of what goes on behind the ivy-covered walls of elite schools (which are likely to conceal faulty plumbing), at state-financed mega-universities (``where you can get a good education, if you want one,'' she writes in evident innocence of her prejudice), and in the hardscrabble world of small and marginal institutions with trailer-park dorms. There is Sinte Gleska, for example, a college in South Dakota that is struggling to carve a niche for itself in the already competitive ``academic marketplace'' of Native American higher education. Matthews gets a good deal of mileage out of anecdotes from student life, with punch lines like ``I told him there was a pizza under the sofa!'' Faculty are good for laughs, too: ``How can she whine for money to the dean when she wears two-hundred-dollar shoes?'' (overheard at a Renaissance scholars' conference). ``After tenure,'' Matthews notes, ``a campus asks only one thing of its professors: keep your brain alive. Many do not, will not, cannot.'' Over the long haul all Matthews's knowing cuteness wears pretty thin. Her touch is informed but light—the result is less journalism than infotainment.
Pub Date: April 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81541-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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