A concise, intelligent prescription for redirecting the American school system through fundamental changes in society. Most politicians and many educators mirror the antics of contortionists when it comes to education. They walk forward to the future while looking back wistfully to the good old days and sitting tight on a budget that was inadequate 20 years ago. Graham, until last year dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education and now director of the research-oriented Spencer Foundation, suffers from no such three-ring thinking. The good old days were never that good, she knows, and today's schools are not so bad. It is the very success of the schools that burdens them with trying to unravel social as well as educational tangles. Graham singles out four sensitive areas: poverty, lowered productivity, lack of public participation, and personal passivity. Such social and public policy problems, she says, are not solved by tweaking the secondary-school curriculum or by calling for an ephemeral ``higher standard.'' Graham is not the first commentator to identify a more general social malaise, but she is extraordinarily pointed, asking, for instance, how a society that is fundamentally anti-intellectual can support a mandate for higher academic performance from its children. Chapters survey the demands of families, government, universities, and business upon schools, as well as their potential contributions. Many suggestions seem simple to implement but encounter inexplicable resistance. For instance, why can't school schedules be changed to accommodate a work force that no longer needs its children on the farms in the summer? A program of scholarships, fellowships, and sabbaticals that would bring in new teachers, revitalize experienced ones, and train administrators in managerial skills would cost only about $50 million annually, Graham estimates, ``less than nine days of interest payments on the savings and loan bail-out.'' Slim but potent, packed with facts and with workable recommendations for improvement in the schools—if only the will were there.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8090-8748-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
