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WHAT THE BEST COLLEGE STUDENTS DO

Name: WHAT THE BEST COLLEGE STUDENTS DO
Author: Ken Bain
ISBN: 978-0-674-06664-9

by Ken Bain ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2012

A soundly encouraging guide for college students to think deeply and for as long as it takes.

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Bain (History and Academic Affairs/Univ. of the District of Columbia; What the Best College Teachers Do, 2004, etc.) taps into the experiences of dynamic, innovative individuals to tease out how their college experience shaped them.

The author does not present much groundbreaking material, but his interviews with Nobel Prize winners, professional athletes and entertainers and well-regarded educators and researchers demonstrate the many vital approaches a student can bring to their college experience. Bain writes with clarity and modulated enthusiasm about intrinsic motivation, adaptive experts and the necessity of invention and the importance of mindfulness. He convincingly argues for the significance of a liberal education—“engaging in dialogues that brought their own perspectives to bear yet tested them against the values and concepts of others and against the rules of reason and the standards of evidence”—but what really piques Bain’s interest is the act of immersing oneself in any activity that ignites true passion. Creativity comes to those who become “lost in something other than themselves.” The experiences of successful students are certainly burnished by exposure to the length and breadth of a liberal curriculum, but they are spurred by awe and fascination. The best students seek the meaning behind the text, its implications and applications, and how those implications interact with what they have already learned. To think in so rich and robust a way as Bain describes—“trying to answer questions or solve problems that they regard as important, intriguing, or just beautiful”—is an aspiration of the first order.

A soundly encouraging guide for college students to think deeply and for as long as it takes.

Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-674-06664-9

Page Count: 260

Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012

Categories:

EDUCATION

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MEMOIRS OF A MINOTAUR

FROM MERRILL LYNCH TO PATTY HEARST TO POETRY

by Robin Magowan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1999

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MEMOIRS OF A MINOTAURFrom Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst to PoetryMagowan, Robin

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999

ISBN: 1-885266-79-0

Page Count: 276

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BUSINESS | EDUCATION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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THE STUDENTS ARE WATCHING

SCHOOLS AND THE MORAL CONTRACT

by Theodore R. Sizer & Nancy Faust Sizer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 1999

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A passionate argument that moral education should be seen as an intrinsic part of high school life suffers from the very abstraction the authors seek to avoid. Sizer, noted author of a trio of school-reform books (Horace’s Hope, 1996, etc.) and his wife, who trains teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, believe that most educators view character education as an “extracurricular” activity designed around a series of “absolute” nouns: respect, integrity, honesty, and so forth. The authors, on the other hand, insist that “the routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matters of character” and that becoming an ethical person ought to be an active struggle that engages students’ minds as much as calculus does. For even as the typical high school preaches a “civil religion” intended to turn out young people of good character, the Sizers point out, the sights and sounds of a typical school day may undermine these same values. Students who walk into broken-down school buildings learn that their education is not a priority. Teachers who come to school ill-prepared also teach their students how to cut corners. Schools with predominantly white honors classes teach that academic winners and losers break down along racial and class lines. Though the Sizers do a wonderful job of highlighting the hypocrisy that students see all too clearly, the authors frequently use “real-life” situations as springboards for airy theorizing. Rather than discussing the frightening rise in student violence, for example, the chapter on “Shoving” contemplates pushing in the hallways, dirty jokes, and rudeness, before redefining ’shoving” past the point of absurdity to mean breaking new intellectual ground. This book makes an eloquent case that schools need to practice what they preach. But because the authors define their moral categories so broadly, the values they champion lose their power. When words mean too much, they ultimately mean too little.