Highly provocative and certain to stimulate a spate of indignant op-ed pieces and blistering bloggery.
Taylor (Religion/Columbia Univ.; Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, 2009, etc.) reaffirms his call—first sounded in his controversial New York Times op-ed piece of April 27, 2009—for a drastic reform of higher education.
With this book, the author will make few friends in academia, at least among the aging and tenured professors whom he attacks. Taylor calls both for the elimination of tenure and for mandatory retirement at age 70, and he characterizes American higher education as expensive, wasteful, archaic and monolithic. He traces the current university organization to a late-18th-century treatise by Kant and argues that the system has changed little since then. Entrenched faculty, fragmented curricula, incompetent teachers, strained financial resources, outmoded teaching strategies—all combine to produce an edifice that Taylor believes is imploding. His alternatives include more flexible, adaptable and thematic interdisciplinary curricula delivered both in classrooms and via other media (principally, the Internet); faculty members who collaborate across traditional disciplines; a diminishing emphasis on research and publishing; an increasing emphasis on high-tech pedagogy; the elimination of duplicate programs at colleges and universities who share pools of potential students; and the creation of partnerships with businesses, nonprofits and other organizations. Taylor reiterates his firm belief that students must still master traditional skills of writing and reading—he required his own children to write a weekly three-page essay—but disdains those old warhorses Term Paper and Dissertation. The author’s tone is neither whimsical nor utopian. Nearing the age of mandatory retirement himself, he writes with urgency and conviction, and even fear. The resistance to change, he argues, is destructive.
Highly provocative and certain to stimulate a spate of indignant op-ed pieces and blistering bloggery.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-59329-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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