War, wrote Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics by other means; so, to its cost, is higher education, argues Bromwich (English/ Yale) in this indictment—by turns lively and learned—of the herd mentality of contemporary American culture. Bromwich's distinction between the traditional notion of ``culture as a tacit knowledge acquired by choice and affinity'' and the debased modern sense of ``culture as social identity'' sets him squarely against contemporary agglomerations of culture and community, which are held together only by the need to identify oneself with all the best current ideas and ideologies. The fissure between left- leaning academics and right-thinking politicians conceals their mutual idolatry of authority over tradition, which would allow the formation of individual thought and identity in dialectical response to a community of writers, thinkers, and actors. In successive chapters, Bromwich traces the abdication of tradition and the individuality it fosters in the face of a superstitious veneration of authority in legal cases involving political correctness, the neoconservatism of George Will and Allan Bloom, and the radical conformism of the ivory tower. His discussions range from trenchantly free-wheeling commentary to exhaustingly close readings of both friends (Burke and Hume, surprisingly, are claimed as forebears of liberal secularism) and foes (Will is vivisected with the kind of care usually reserved for cartoon characters; though he's left for dead, you know he'll be back whole and unmarked in the next episode). But only in the last chapter—a well-informed critique of the politics of literature departments that value new theoretical work in proportion to their failure to comprehend it—does Bromwich find a mordantly persuasive tone worthy of his high argument. More impressive, then, for its range than its achievement; like Irving Howe, Bromwich seems more successful in breathtaking individual polemics than in sustained argument.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1992
ISBN: 0-300-05702-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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