Getman, a veteran law prof at Harvard and Yale now teaching at the University of Texas, provides a troubled liberal's response to recent critiques of higher education by Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball. The nature of academic activity, Getman argues, is its split between the egalitarian ideals of its educational mission and the elitism of its institutions, which ends up infecting even its most idealistic aspirants. Using a long series of anecdotes about his experiences as a law teacher, visiting scholar, arbitrator, and general counsel to the AAUP, Getman chronicles his growing disillusionment with the self-serving hypocrisy and cynical careerism of his chosen profession, yet manages a repeated refrain of admiration for challenging teachers, respected mentors, and principled debaters of the social issues of the 60's. The result is a wide-ranging monologue, long on examples but short on perspicuous generalizations, that shows Getman rather endearingly muddling through to insights (e.g., the principal function of academic institutions is to protect themselves; most professors are more interested in prestige than money; effective college teaching is so ill-recompensed that it has become its own reward) that most of his readers are likely to have won on their own long before they pick up his book. Getman's tender-minded liberalism—engagingly self-critical but lacking the polemical cutting edge of either forebears like Trilling and Schlesinger or opponents like Bloom and Kimball—is more likely to provoke nods of recognition from other right-minded liberals than to convince hard-charging conservative reformers, or even to advance the current debate.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-292-72755-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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