Yet another in the flurry of recent volumes advocating choice in schools; this one emphasizes ``the discipline of the market.'' By the former chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco (now chairman of IBM) and others involved in the educational policy debate, this latest thesis nailed on the door of the educational establishment invokes the quality management theories of the late W. Edwards Deming and the success stories of the RJR Nabisco Foundation's Next Century Schools Program. Funded by $30 million in grants from the foundation, the 43 schools in the Next Century group were scattered all over the country and used their grants to implement programs ranging from a longer school year (in North Carolina) to banishing grades (in Kansas) and parent education programs (in Texas). What the schools had in common was the involvement of the entire school community. A strong principal was critical to success, but so was the commitment of teachers, central administrations and school boards, and parents. The Deming approach stresses teamwork among workers and executives in creating a product that will satisfy the customer. But when talking about schools, who is the customer? Is it the students? The parents? The business leaders who complain that high school graduates are unemployable because they can't read or write? In this case, the authors have the marketplace in mind as the major ``customer'' as they advocate the application of successful business management techniques (e.g., rewards for good teachers; standards of performance to be met by all students) to the process of educational reform. This volume makes an eloquent plea for change if future generations are to meet the demands of the 21st century. As a Maine math teacher puts it, the problem is not that schools aren't what they used to be, but that ``schools are what they used to be''—designed to educate children as 19th- century factory workers, not 20th-century problem solvers. This report on the success of the Next Century schools and their wide-ranging experiments in education is heartening, as is the authors' conviction that if business (Ford, IBM, etc.) can change to quality management, so can education.
Pub Date: April 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93749-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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