been.
This analysis of a controversial trend in American education—the gearing of public schools in the 1980s toward teaching
self-esteem—is all but doomed by its lack of focus and poor organization. Stout (Educational Leadership and Policy Studies/California State Univ., Northridge) is certainly capable of lucid intellectual history, as she shows in her accounts of the progressive school movement of the 1800s and the rise of "discovery learning" and the "open curriculum" in the 1960s. But she is never able to do the same for what she calls "the self-esteem movement." After differentiating real self-esteem (based on tangible achievements) from false self-esteem (based on uncritical self-regard), Stout immediately abandons this distinction to launch into a slash-and-burn critique of every educational practice she attributes to the self-esteem movement. She hits all the popular targets—grade inflation, cooperative learning, social promotion, multiculturalism, Ritalin, poststructuralism—yet never makes a historical connection between any of these practices and the promoters of self- esteem, writers she never even names until her final chapter. In the end, Stout's greatest problem is that she has become what she beheld. Though she criticizes the self-esteem movement for its narcissism, she is relentlessly self-indulgent, peppering her analysis with pointless glimpses into her personal life. (Why do we need to know that her Victorian literature teacher hated women and flirted with men?) While decrying the "victim mentality" bred by self-esteemers, she portrays herself as a culture-wars martyr, badgered by her students who expect A’s for subpar work and reviled by her ed-school colleagues for her resistance to their constructivist methods. Despite championing the cause of intellectualism over "emotivism," Stout lets her anger bleed onto virtually every page, producing a document equally flavored by rant and whine, with just enough social history to let the reader taste what might have
been.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-7382-0257-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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