To ask and answer the question “What would Socrates do?” may not cure the pathologies of poverty, but Shorris insists it’s a...
A prolific author and founder of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a free program designed to teach reflective thinking to the disadvantaged, tells stories about the students and teachers touched by the experience.
Inspired almost 20 years ago by a prison inmate’s remark that the poor needed “a moral alternative to the street,” Shorris (The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times, 2007, etc.) established the Clemente Course, using the ideas of the great books to pierce what he clunkily terms “the surround of force” that bears down on the impoverished, keeping them from fully exercising their citizenship. Here, he offers a field report on the progress and spread of Clemente and its variants in Alaska, Wisconsin, Washington, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Australia, Korea, Canada and Sudan. All courses employ first-class teachers, all use the Socratic method, and while the curriculum may vary, the motivating idea abides: that philosophy, history, art history, literature and logic belong to everyone and that they inspire the critical thinking necessary for the poor to move from lives of reaction to reflection to civic freedom. Although he generously praises fellow teachers and especially the students who have overcome so much, Shorris asserts his progressive bona fides throughout and barely suppresses his ego beneath a bumbling-professor pose. Nor, other than a couple of thin studies, does he offer any more than anecdotal evidence about Clemente’s efficacy. There’s no arguing with the individual success stories, with the dedication of the instructors, or with the earnestness of the enterprise, but whether a heavy dose of Plato and Kant, Keats and Coleridge, Botticelli and Renoir is the answer to poverty remains problematic. Shorris died last June but not before receiving a National Humanities Medal for his work and surely not without the thanks of thousands of low-income people now equipped to continue their educations.
To ask and answer the question “What would Socrates do?” may not cure the pathologies of poverty, but Shorris insists it’s a necessary exercise for the poor to begin to free themselves.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08127-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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
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
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