An examination of the quandaries surrounding the teaching profession from various angles.
Cohen (The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?, 2009, etc.) discusses the complexity of teaching, and in starting with the task of defining the profession, he illustrates the byzantine nature of the American education system. He explains some underlying problems that are often neglected, such as how teachers “do not play a central part in setting standards of occupational quality,” and he touches upon conflicts concerning testing and controversies surrounding what the results mean. Cohen emphasizes how educators are not practicing in isolation, which further complicates the matter. If there are limited connections between school and real-world experiences, he writes, then students’ investment in the system is compromised. “Teaching in such circumstances is the human improver’s version of unrequited love: the prospect of success is appealing, but its costs can be enormous when students’ and teachers’ work is not framed by contracts to work hard together. The responsibility for improvement is one-sided,” he writes. The author mentions societal influences such as the emergence of “well-educated and engaged young teachers in Teach For America” and charter schools as a positive response to the issues, but he does not explain how or why. Cohen’s focus seems to drift in his exploration of types of instructional discourse. He does not offer solutions to the predicaments of the book’s title, but he does prove that “US public education is not organized to help teachers manage the predicaments of their occupation.” Uneven but ultimately useful for educators and reformers.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-674-05110-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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