An ultimately creepy look at intolerance on campus and how it should be countered. Like many of the good-hearted, Marcus, a professor in the Educational Administration Department of Rowan College, is captivated by the fallacy that if you can somehow cure the smallest symptoms, you have rooted out the disease. While there is little doubt that hate speech—and the racism from which it stems—is a serious societal problem, hate speech on American campuses always seems to boil down anecdotally to a few dozen frequently told and retold incidents (which Marcus makes sure we go over one more time). Yet he seems to believe that quieting the misled few among the educated, enlightened mass of college students is an important issue. And he gives it both barrels. An extended history of racism is followed by an analysis of the affirmative action debate; other chapters deal at length with such issues as college speech codes. The analysis is rarely original, but it is certainly extensive: Marcus strings together endless pages of quotes and statistics, occasionally pausing for interpolations. Using as his model the disruption caused at Kean College in 1993 by a speech by Nation of Islam's Khalid Abdul Muhamad, Marcus then looks at what colleges should and should not do to reduce hate speech. His solution is a legalistic reinterpretation of the First Amendment that—no matter how Marcus glosses over it—would allow censorship. He also champions classes in intergroup relations and a series of kindly coercive measures to make certain that everyone gets along. Regular ``human relations audits'' will then ensure that everything is working as planned. Occasionally, universities have acted in loco parentis. With these measures in place, they would add another member to the family—Big Brother.
Pub Date: July 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-275-95438-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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