Sexton clearly shows how less shouting and more listening can lead to a reclaiming of a lost middle ground.
A forceful argument on behalf of the modern university.
Having established himself as a visionary when he was president of NYU (2002-2015), Sexton (Baseball as a Road to God, 2013, etc.) argues that a university that returns to basic principles and extends its horizons offers a remedy to the madness of our current political discourse. Well before he became a scholar of religion or a law school dean, the author honed his analytical skills as a debater and debate coach, thriving in a competitive arena in which he learned the importance of listening and carefully considering opposing views in order to sharpen the response. It was an exchange where “participants lived in a world of ideas and were committed to testing their views.” In contemporary discourse, that world has been reduced to memes and slogans, sacrificing nuance and complexity, and opposing views are too often ridiculed or silenced rather than considered. We now live in a world that suffers from what Sexton terms “secular dogmatism…a close-mindedness, or lack of intellectual openness.” Universities, he maintains, “should serve as incubators for a new secular ecumenism,” which does not merely accommodate a variety of different political viewpoints and religious faiths, but embraces the diversity of the world at large, reflecting an increasingly globalized culture. In a time in which there are strong inclinations toward building walls against such diversity, Sexton believes that higher education must re-establish itself as a “ ‘sacred space’ for critical reflection” and “the meaningful testing of ideas.” The university must be a space where rigorous debate and intellectual exchange can flourish. The author shows how NYU has developed into a global institution with international portal campuses, and he suggests that higher education as a whole can be a powerful force for a better world.
Sexton clearly shows how less shouting and more listening can lead to a reclaiming of a lost middle ground.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-24337-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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