Engaging and inspiring, but without significant purpose in an overcrowded topic.
Another look at the college-admissions process—this time through the experiences of an influential Long Island guidance counselor and seven of his students.
When Pulitzer Prize–winning education reporter Marcus moved from U.S. News & World Report to Newsday, he noticed that the area’s highest acceptance rates were coming from a relatively small, unknown school—the diverse Oyster Bay High School—and that the mitigating factor was an especially committed counselor named Gwyeth “Smitty” Smith. To determine what made Smitty so successful, Marcus followed him through the process, focusing in particular on seven students. There was the underachieving athlete with the big heart and difficult home life; the engineering hopeful with an overbearing mother; the well-rounded Jewish girl who worried that she wouldn’t stand out; the overworked African-American who would be the first in her family to go to college; the intellectual Korean-American who wasn’t sure he could live up to his family’s expectations; the free-spirited girl who couldn’t focus; and the valedictorian who never had to worry. Marcus’s portraits are honest and interesting, and some of the outcomes are quite surprising, thanks in part to the counselor who encouraged the students to think outside the box, even when it meant defying parents or preconceived notions about reputation. Smitty is clearly an excellent counselor who goes to great lengths to make sure his students make the right choices—negotiating work hours with a student’s employer to make sure she had enough time to study, seeking out admissions officers at conferences to talk about specific students. But while it’s encouraging to read about a counselor more committed to the students’ well-being than the number of Ivy League acceptances on his rap sheet, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary or illuminating about his practices, and readers may struggle to find a takeaway message that hasn’t been covered in countless other college-admissions books—including Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers (2002) and by Jay Mathews’s Harvard Schmarvard (2003).
Engaging and inspiring, but without significant purpose in an overcrowded topic.Pub Date: July 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-214-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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