A bountifully self-serving account by Sperling, CEO of the Apollo Group, the NASDAQ-listed parent company of the University of Phoenix, about how he came to found an education company with revenues of over $500 million and capitalization of $3 billion. In the 1960s, Sperling, campus radical and economic historian at San Jose State, developed a course for local teachers and police officers designed to help them reduce juvenile delinquency in their neighborhoods. Sperling, who had been poor as a child, was committed to helping others improve their lot through education. Noticing that adults did not have good access to higher education, he was inspired to start a company that would provide an educational “product” that was appropriate and convenient for adults. Attacked for creating “diploma mills,” Sperling became embroiled in a war with the educational establishment, which he describes as “largely proxies for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (largely religious) tradition, and an innovation that was based on the values of the marketplace—transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.” Unfortunately, Sperling barely articulates either his opponents’ criticisms (choosing instead to characterize them as elitists intent on protecting middle-class privilege) or any details about the courses and degree programs his company offers. Readers may be left guessing what the “new model” for adult education is all about—and wondering why Sperling, who benefited from an elite education himself (Cambridge, UC Berkeley), does not recommend the same nostrum for all underprivileged students. Perhaps he believes that Wall Street investors, who now own his company, have little interest in academic debates. Yet by omitting any substantive arguments, Sperling has missed an opportunity to tell the world how his programs succeed, not only in providing a profitable form of education, but in providing a better education, or indeed one half so good, as the models he disdains. A lamentably failed apologia for for-profit education.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-471-32604-6
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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