Parents of college students are already in financial pain from the spiraling costs of tuition. They'll flinch further after reading this telling critique of why undergraduates aren't getting their educational money's worth. Writing with grace and good humor, Huber (a former administrator at Hunter College) begins, as good educators often do, by posing the right questions. Why are the costs of higher education outstripping inflation by two to one? Why is a student at a community college more likely to be taught by a professor with a doctorate than is a student at a prestigious university, who probably has to settle for a teaching assistant? Who's in charge here? The multiple-choice answer most likely to be correct: The faculty. Here is no malicious villain, but groups caught in a game whose rules have fossilized. The faculty sets the curriculum. The faculty determines who receives tenure. Hired as teachers, professors are evaluated and rewarded on their output of research, not their teaching skills. Popular teachers are suspect, just as popular art is judged less worthy. Administrators, boards of trustees, government bureaucracy, and, yes, parents in search of elite schools to upgrade their own social status are guilty as well. In addition to providing a clear discussion of the several pros and cons of multicultural programs, Huber offers seven thoughtful recommendations—common sense, really—to return universities to their teaching ideals. Are his ideas likely to be realized? Not without the whip of outside forces. Earlier, it was the prod of national security; in this decade, perhaps it will be the global marketplace. A witty and erudite read, only slightly marred by repetition, that measures sacrosanct academia against the decade's new high standards of quality and productivity.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-913969-43-5
Page Count: 207
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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