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what has occurred since the writer graduated (p. 165; p. 192) may raise concerns that some of the observations are outdated or inaccurate.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
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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