Diluted usefulness resulting from a broad scope.
A guide for making decisions about post–high school educational options.
Addressing prospective college students, parents, and educators, the ambitious reach of this title works against depth of analysis. After discussing how the book’s “Jobs to Be Done” framework assesses students’ motivations, college selection is presented as a three-step process: “Know Thyself,” “Identify Matches,” and “Check and Choose.” Specific needs based on personal characteristics such as race or socio-economic class are overlooked; due to some tone-deaf language and gaps in information, the work fails to address the needs of many young people from marginalized backgrounds. Leaning on data about lifetime income potential, the authors emphasize where/when rather than whether to choose college, so this may be of limited use to those pursuing vocational trades. While suspending concern over cost to find ideal matches seems out of touch, the authors balance this message with visioning around individual priorities, clarifying throughout how rankings and perceived status may not equate with fit. Theoretical in tone, this work may be more useful to those planning a gap year or coming to higher education after an absence than to current high school students. The authors conflate the roles of educators and entrepreneurs, colleges and training platforms, presenting examples of milkshake sales and IKEA’s “profitable magic.” The “jobs” language frames learners as customers hiring a college, resulting in a transactional perspective that may not resonate with college leaders.
Diluted usefulness resulting from a broad scope. (appendix, about the authors, notes, index) (Nonfiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-119-57011-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Jossey-Bass/Wiley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2019
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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