A heartfelt, well-documented exposé of a major rip-off that debases education in several important ways.
Intellectual property, developed in the biology and electronics labs of our great universities, is being methodically transferred to industry, reports independent scholar and journalist Washburn.
For the past two decades or so, she argues in her first book, institutions of higher learning have sold out the public weal for private wealth. The sciences, generally sponsored by big business, do quite well while the humanities lose in scholastic budget battles. It’s not Chaucer who pays the bills. On campus, research comes before science teaching; targeted study supports corporate needs; proprietary and secret investigations are replacing platform research and shared information. Supported by federal legislation, researchers simultaneously serve two masters: their educational institutions and the mighty corporate sponsors that fund their studies. These researchers frequently have personal financial interests in the results of their often-tainted science. In exchange for cash, stock, and corporate titles, the sponsors retain important rights in the studies, including control of journal reports. Big money is involved, and no one should be surprised that virtually every college, from mighty Ivy League to little land-grant school, boasts its own active technology-transfer office, eager to provide facilities and contracts. Beside ghostwritten reports and bad mentoring, the results may include flawed protocols and fatally mistreated human test subjects. The free marketplace of information, the historic core of science, is going out of business. Instead, short-term aims clothed in proprietary secrecy are on sale (for considerable fees) with an academic imprimatur. Chaucer gives way to computer programs and the demands of genome manipulation. Taxpayer-funded studies are subject to license fees, instead of being freely shared. While Washburn doesn’t suggest that the IRS investigate the unrelated business income of tax-exempt institutions, she does advocate specific corrective actions along the lines of improved legislation and third-party oversight.
A heartfelt, well-documented exposé of a major rip-off that debases education in several important ways.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-09051-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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