Education's in, school's out in this no-holds-barred, computer- instruction-driven harangue against American public education. In the wake of the information explosion represented by microchips, artificial intelligence (AI), and vastly more efficient telecommunications, Perelman (The Global Mind, 1976) dismisses present-day educational reform movements as attempts to ``reform'' horse-and-buggy travel for some hypothetical ``Travel 1900'' forum. The self-teaching skills displayed by recent developments in AI make schools obsolete, he says; the only charge schools can now be given is to legislate themselves out of existence. Perelman is fuzzy on the details of exactly how ``hyperlearning'' (HL) will allow us to break loose from the muck of voracious public-education lobbies, ``yak in the box'' college lecture-halls, pointlessly punitive testing and grading policies, unaccountable administrators, and futile reform projects; his account of ``learning in the HL world'' recalls a Jules Verne tableau of a dazzling technological future whose premises and workings are taken to be self-evidently efficacious—but his trashing of the educational establishment is cheerfully uninhibited, bristling with jazzy quotations, statistics, and cryptically labeled charts. Nor is Perelman shy about specific immediate recommendations for privatizing education—on the model of Christopher Whittle, who ``just might be the Henry Ford of learning''—and legally prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of academic credentials: a step, he argues persuasively, that would put most schools out of business. Even readers who aren't comfortable with the technovisionary thrust of Perelman's program—especially newsworthy now that Whittle has lured Benno Schmidt away from Yale—will find themselves hard- pressed to discount his exuberant critique of the weary round of fruitless activities (showing up; passively listening; cramming for tests) that passes for American public education. Educators themselves, however, had better have their blood pressure tested before they sit down with this book.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-11286-2
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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