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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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GONE FOR GOOD

TALES OF UNIVERSITY LIFE AFTER THE GOLDEN AGE

by Stuart Rojstaczer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999

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A serious, although informal, introduction to the realities of the university world today. A scientist who writes about a university is about as rare as a duck in a tree. Most recent reflections on changes in the academic world have come from humanists and social scientists—and most of them have been disgruntled, many bitter. Rojstaczer, a geologist and environmental engineer (Duke), shares their concerns but, by contrast, is refreshingly balanced and calm. His chatty style never betrays anger or despair. He humanizes his subject where others have often parodied it. He recognizes that a brief postwar “golden age,” perhaps a third of a century long, in universities’ wealth, confidence, and freedom from accountability is forever gone. He doesn’t like many qualities of today’s research institutions: grade inflation, a reduction in course loads and requirements for the major, students who won’t work hard, universities’ failure to live within their means, the corruption of athletic programs, the dependence upon fund-raising, and the difficulties of attracting graduate students and getting research grants. But who does like them? If his concerns about intellectual fashions, faculty politics, and lazy students are scarcely unique, what is distinctive is Rojstaczer’s refusal to succumb to nostalgia and his recognition that today’s universities face realities that didn’t exist in the 1960s. Yet his book would have been improved by more extended reflections about what has in fact improved in American higher education since the 1960s—its greater diversity of students, faculty members, and concerns, and its greater openness to ideas chief among them—even if these improvements have exacted their costs. An anecdotal yet insightful tour of American universities by an insider.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-19-512682-3

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999

Categories:

EDUCATION

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THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE

MOVING BEYOND TRADITIONAL CLASSROOMS AND ``TOUGHER STANDARDS''

by Alfie Kohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1999

Though Kohn’s zeal for reform is undeniable, in this book he seems content to preach to the progressive choir rather than...

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Another blistering critique (after Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, 1993) of traditional public schooling by a progressive who displays the same intellectual rigidity he abhors in others.

In pithy, take-no-prisoners prose, Kohn mounts a frontal assault on what he calls the “Old School,” where teachers rely on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, and grades to “transmit” a series of isolated facts and skills to their students. Rebutting those who believe that education should get “back to basics,” Kohn makes a persuasive case that the majority of schools never left them behind. The author also targets the “tougher standards” movement, arguing that a greater emphasis on standardized testing and other evaluations needlessly pits students against one another and ultimately leads to mediocrity. Since schools are already failing with this approach, why offer more of the same? Instead, Kohn, leaning heavily on John Dewey and Jean Piaget, proposes multiage, interdisciplinary classrooms where students work on projects and actively “construct” their own knowledge, teachers act as “facilitators,” and grades give way to performance-based evaluations. As presented here, however, Kohn’s solution is just another brand of educational orthodoxy, the progressive version of the one-size-fits-all that currently afflicts the public schools. Oddly, for someone who decries simplistic thinking, Kohn does quite a bit of it. At one point, he frames the education debate this way: those who seek “education for profit” vs. those who seek “education for democracy.” (Guess which side he’s on!) Worse, Kohn belittles everyone who doesn’t agree with him. E.D. Hirsch, of cultural literacy fame, for example, is dismissed as the father of the “bunch o’ facts” school. The harangue spills over into the book’s lengthy appendix, in which the author debunks all the research he doesn’t like, and even into the extensive footnotes, which endlessly recycle arguments made more effectively elsewhere.

Though Kohn’s zeal for reform is undeniable, in this book he seems content to preach to the progressive choir rather than persuade others to adopt his cause.