A faulty diagnosis of what ails our schools, and an account of one woman's inconclusive attempt to cure them. Unlike many other proponents of educational reform, Wallace, former superintendent of the Vance County school district in North Carolina, and Graves, a reporter for the Oregonian, identify the bell curve as the major culprit in our educational woes. This statistical tool, they say, fails to accurately describe phenomena controlled by human will, such as achievement in school. The authors feel that schools' reliance on on this faulty measure results in lower standards, since we strive towards the middle, rather than the top, of the curve: textbooks are homogenized and lifeless because they are geared to the average reading ability of each grade; and since the curve presupposes the inability of certain students to achieve the average, these children are tracked early on into basic-level courses. But Wallace and Graves have merely set up a straw man. Standards are low, but the bell curve only describes that, it doesn't cause it. Textbooks are dull, but unnecessasrily so—even writing geared to the curve's center can be lively. And students who are tracked into basic classes are generally not challenged because teachers' reduced expectations cause them to give up on these kids altogether. Most of the book is devoted to Wallace's experience in Vance County, a poor and underachieving school district where Wallace was allowed to try her reforms. She disposed of grade levels and grading and allowed students to progress at their own pace. (Innovative schools such as the Paint Branch Elementary School in Maryland have had success with this more fluid system.) Unfortunately, Wallace only stayed a couple of years because of political infighting (described at length). She claims small successes—measured, ironically, against the reviled curve—but it is impossible to determine success or failure of an educational reform program in such a short time. Simplistic and self-congratulatory.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11876-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
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
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