An incisive examination of failed utopian schemes in the classroom.
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Ravitch (The Troubled Crusade, 1983) recounts a dispiriting record of pitched debates and failed reform attempts in the American educational system over the last century.
At the turn of the 20th century, an influx of immigrants and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy compelled a reevaluation of school standards, curriculum, and methods. Two opposing approaches arose on how to deal with the situation. Advocates of liberal education, such as Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, proposed that all students should pursue an academic curriculum. On the other hand, the progressive education movement called for alternatives for non-college-bound students. Inspired by John Dewey, it sought to transform education into both a science and a lever for social reform. But undemanding vocational, industrial, and general programs designed by Dewey’s disciples, Ravitch contends, impaired the prospects of the poor, immigrants, and racial minority groups. An epidemic of educational fads followed—vo-tech schools, IQ testing, child-centered schools, life adjustment, open education, community schools, multiculturalism, the self-esteem movement, even “frontier thinkers” who briefly saw in the Soviet Union an antidote to the competition and striving that underlay both American capitalism and education. Only in conclusion does Ravitch acknowledge that progressive education made valuable contributions in emphasizing children’s motivations and understanding. But with impeccable scholarship and withering logic she demonstrates how, under the influence of this movement, schools lost their focus on their primary teaching mission when asked to solve more social problems than they could handle. In perhaps the greatest irony, progressive educators, claiming the mantle of scientific reasoning, pushed theories related to children’s ability to learn that could seldom be proven definitively.
An incisive examination of failed utopian schemes in the classroom.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-84417-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
The brothers Solomon—Robert (Philosophy/Univ. of Texas at Austin; A Passion for Justice, 1990, etc.) and Jon (Classics/Univ. of Arizona)—take a bracingly common-sensical approach—in the form of 137 sermonettes—to the problems everybody agrees are dogging the American university. Briskly eschewing the theoretical baggage of Allan Bloom and Charles Sykes, the authors argue that American universities, for all their energy and resourcefulness, have lost sight of their primary mission—undergraduate education—in the name of will-o'-the-wisp prestige and fat outside grants for research that, however valuable, often have scant connection to that educational mission. ``Professors are now for sale,'' the Solomons announce in the manner of Ross Perot, and they have plenty of homespun suggestions on how to bring the sheep and their straying shepherds back to the fold. Some of these are surprisingly persuasive: Require administrators to teach; hire students as tutors and advisors; end the ``five-year fraud'' that keeps so many students in college, paying out tuition, past their nominal graduation date. Other proposals, however, sound eccentric or cranky: Mandate open admissions in all state schools; discourage most high-school students from going on directly to college; replace tenured appointments with five-year contracts; abolish departments, course requirements, teaching awards, and used-book sales. There's something here to offend just about everyone—the authors' pamphleteering strain becomes coarsest in their remarks about English departments, those hotbeds of factitious political debate—but their deepest rancor is reserved for professional administrators, who come off looking like hired guns whose cupidity is equalled only by their ineptness. The Solomons' solution? Return university governance to the faculty while riding those wastrels out of town on a rail. A commonplace book more full of sound bites than a political convention: perfect bedside reading for academics who want to drift off to sleep believing that they really can make a difference in recalling the education business to its true vocation.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-201-57719-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
Parents of college students are already in financial pain from the spiraling costs of tuition. They'll flinch further after reading this telling critique of why undergraduates aren't getting their educational money's worth. Writing with grace and good humor, Huber (a former administrator at Hunter College) begins, as good educators often do, by posing the right questions. Why are the costs of higher education outstripping inflation by two to one? Why is a student at a community college more likely to be taught by a professor with a doctorate than is a student at a prestigious university, who probably has to settle for a teaching assistant? Who's in charge here? The multiple-choice answer most likely to be correct: The faculty. Here is no malicious villain, but groups caught in a game whose rules have fossilized. The faculty sets the curriculum. The faculty determines who receives tenure. Hired as teachers, professors are evaluated and rewarded on their output of research, not their teaching skills. Popular teachers are suspect, just as popular art is judged less worthy. Administrators, boards of trustees, government bureaucracy, and, yes, parents in search of elite schools to upgrade their own social status are guilty as well. In addition to providing a clear discussion of the several pros and cons of multicultural programs, Huber offers seven thoughtful recommendations—common sense, really—to return universities to their teaching ideals. Are his ideas likely to be realized? Not without the whip of outside forces. Earlier, it was the prod of national security; in this decade, perhaps it will be the global marketplace. A witty and erudite read, only slightly marred by repetition, that measures sacrosanct academia against the decade's new high standards of quality and productivity.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-913969-43-5
Page Count: 207
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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