The author, a true believer, does not spend much time on counterarguments and outlines a future that some will find...
Carey, who directs the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, discusses his belief that the computer and the cloud are the future of higher education.
The author begins with a brief account of a course he took at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Introduction to Biology—The Secret of Life,” which he initially conceals is online. He revisits this experience throughout the book, advocating for its design and opportunities for students: The course is available to anyone with an Internet connection; students can help one another; students can rewind and redo difficult portions. Later, Carey chronicles his visit to the actual class and tells us that the online lectures were much better than the live one. The author also discusses his trips to key institutions that are moving resolutely toward a major online presence (Stanford, MIT—which has partnered with Harvard University), describes interviews with significant players in the technological revolution (he spent lots of time in Silicon Valley), and lets us know that the old way—the “hybrid university,” he calls it—is in its death throes. Tuition is soaring; many students aren’t graduating; many aren’t learning much of anything (too much partying). Carey believes that large universities, especially, are trying to do too much, with simultaneous emphases on the liberal arts, research and vocational training. Much of this, he believes, has deleterious aspects. Most professors interested principally in their own work, for example, don’t teach very well, and Harvard and a host of other top traditional universities are, well, elitist. Writing about his walk through Harvard’s campus: “The gates were open and anyone could walk through them, but they were barriers nonetheless, architectural messages that were not hard to understand.”
The author, a true believer, does not spend much time on counterarguments and outlines a future that some will find exhilarating, others depressing.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-205-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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
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