A handy, accessible, relatively useful package.
Reviews of 42 boarding schools in the U.S., U.K. and Canada by former students who have gone on to attend top universities.
These days, boarding schools are well versed in the hard sell via sleek websites, polished DVDs and professional school-review sites that often simply regurgitate a school’s marketing material. Parents and potential students will be thrilled with this independent guide showcasing the perspectives of former students who have gone on to brighter things. Although its range is limited—overlooking, for example, all the private military prep schools—the book is well organized. Each section provides the name and street address of the school, the founding date, a glowing quotation and a short list of notable alumni. Reviews are introduced with the name of the college or university the reviewer attends, followed by their prep school graduation year. Each review covers five standard sections: Academics, College Counseling, Admissions Process, Extracurricular Activities and Quality of Life. All entries conclude with a web address on PrepReview.com that connects readers to further information about the school; however, a subscription is required to access most of the premium content. Within these reviews, readers will run into a plethora of platitudinous praise (“Kent is an amazing place,” “academics at St. Paul’s were amazing”) and the occasional criticism (“everything at [Northfield Mount Hermon] is micromanaged,” “I found our university preparation lacking” at Cheltenham Ladies’ College). Some comments are so sweeping that readers may question how the college-age reviewer gained such a far-reaching perspective: The Harkness method used at Phillips Exeter Academy leads to “probing discussion on a breadth of topics at intellectual levels rare at most secondary schools,” while a new arts building at Northfield Mount Hermon School “will be one of, if not the, most advanced arts building in New England.” Speculative comments about what has occurred since the writer graduated (p. 165; p. 192) may raise concerns that some of the observations are outdated or inaccurate.
A handy, accessible, relatively useful package.Pub Date: May 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453682487
Page Count: 320
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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