A probing examination of the strengths and weaknesses—but mostly the weaknesses—of our nation's top-rated and best-funded public high schools. Washington Post education reporter Mathews (A Mothers Touch, 1992) paints a compelling portrait of the educators, parents, students, and curricula of wealthy Mamaroneck High School in suburban New York, while also offering running commentaries on the other elite schools that he has visited during the past three years. While he does grant these schools their victories, he is extremely critical of their approach to students who arent overachievers. Mathews is especially perturbed by the school's enthusiasm for the tracking system, which relegates economically and socially disadvantaged students- -particularly blacks and Latinos—to the lower educational ranks and denies them access to the school's most challenging courses. He is concerned, too, with the lack of scholarly research thus far into the ``odd and potentially harmful ways these schools have stratified their students.'' Since the elite schools seek mainly to benefit their majority constituency—which happens to be the upper-class and motivated students—it should come as no surprise that this constituency's parents and the educators who establish school policies are reluctant to change their ways. The school budget in Mamaroneck is also designed to accommodate the most productive students. Though Mamaroneck offers more advanced- placement courses and science options than most of the college-bound students will ever have the time to take, those are the last classes to fall off the roster, even if enrollment is slim. Theyre also the least welcoming classes to the suburb's disadvantaged students. Fact-filled and engaging, a trenchant study, indispensable to the policy-makers for America's top 230 high schools (as ranked in the book's useful index). (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8129-2447-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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