A thoroughly researched and vigorous history of an institution that has “gained new vigor and proliferated progeny not only...
A celebration of America’s elite research universities.
Axtell (Emeritus, Humanities/Coll. of William and Mary; The Making of Princeton University, 2006, etc.) offers an authoritative, panoramic history of American higher education, from its origins in 12th-century Europe to the present. Drawing on prolific research, including student and faculty diaries, the author makes a convincing case that “the university is the most versatile institution in contemporary society,” with America’s leading research institutions “at the apex of the higher education system,” serving as “ ‘sieves’ for sorting people, regulating mobility, and credentialing experts…and as secular ‘temples’ for the legitimation of official knowledge and new ideas.” In medieval Europe, higher education focused on training clergy, but with the growth of an “increasingly complex and litigious urban population,” students moved toward legal studies to train for positions in royal or church administrations. Axtell’s investigation of changes in faculty, curricula, and student life yields some surprising facts—at the Oxbridge colleges in the 16th century, needy students served the sons of aristocrats. Curricular change often responded to students’ desires: French and Italian, for example, were offered when students expressed a wish to travel or seek employment in diplomatic missions. In antebellum America, the nation’s “touching faith in education” resulted in “the wildfire spread of versatile academies and small denominational colleges.” The author attributes the rise of universities to the professionalization of the academic career and the creation of specialized disciplines, which in turn led to the development of laboratories and libraries. In the 19th century, with American universities still in a nascent stage, many faculty were trained in Germany, importing to their home institutions the seminar format, a demand for growth in libraries, and the elective system. Today, argues the author emphatically, because they compete for excellent faculty and students, foster research, and are committed to broad liberal education, elite American universities will continue to thrive.
A thoroughly researched and vigorous history of an institution that has “gained new vigor and proliferated progeny not only in the United States but around the globe.”Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-691-14959-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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