An edifying and inspiring argument for the imperishable value of a liberal education.
Greene offers a spirited defense of a liberal education not reducible to quantitative assessments.
The author, a literary critic and professor emerita at Scripps College, observes that society has lost its faith in the power of liberal education, once understood as the surest path to the “cultivation of the human and the creation of a citizenry capable of democracy.” Greene notes that the institution was once cherished for training students in the responsible stewardship of one’s own freedom. However, the tide of opinion has turned against it in recent years, caricaturing it as feckless navel-gazing; now decision-makers want unambiguously measurable results, usually of the kind that point to economic progress. But quantitative rubrics are incapable of measuring the fundamentally ineffable—including the manifold benefits yielded by an education in the humanities and the magic of a professor’s personal interactions with their students.Instead of “accountability,” an anodyne bureaucratic word that “refers to something that can be calculated, measured, as in a tallying up, keeping score,” Greene prefers to prioritize “responsibility,” a term that implies responsiveness and engagement and suggests the obligations teachers and students have to each other and to themselves. Without such a perspective, those who join the workforce are missing the bigger picture, a point powerfully made by the author: “Checking off boxes gets you doctors who can read numbers on a screen but can’t hear what a patient is saying; architects who fail to imagine how a housing project affects a neighborhood; engineers who fail to ask how a dam affects the population downstream; software makers who have no idea if their program can be used by nonexperts.”
Greene furnishes the reader with a concrete example of the responsibility she prizes by discussing her teaching of Shakespeare (depicted in a “composite of many classes” the author taught over the course of 40 years at Scripps College). Greene convincingly demolishes the benighted obsession with formulaic teaching assessments and astutely limns the nature of the classroom experience, a “relationship, a crisscross of relationships, two-ways, multiple ways, fraught with the complexities that come with a relationship, times ten, times a thousand.” This is the principal virtue of the book: an aversion to approaches that lack nuance or depth; Greene admirably refuses to succumb to the currents of the time. Moreover, her defense of the humanities as a devotion to an endless fascination with all things human is as philosophically rigorous as it is affectingly impassioned. At the crux of that argument is the formidable figure of Shakespeare, the “heart of humanism.” Greene writes, “I came away feeling, that’s what we love about Shakespeare, he makes us feel good about being human. It was a feeling more than a thought, a flash more than a feeling. I don’t know how else to say it, just glad to be a part of it, humanity in all its silliness, splendor, squalor, sordidness, grandeur, outrageousness.” This is an important contribution to today’s education debates and a sterling example of the intellectual virtues it valorizes. An edifying and inspiring argument for the imperishable value of a liberal education.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781421444604
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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