A trashing of America's schools of education by Kramer (At a Tender Age, 1988; In Defense of the Family, 1983), who made a yearlong tour of leading schools of education in the US from Teacher's College at Columbia to the University of Washington, sitting in on classes and interviewing students and professors. Using a tried-and-true journalistic technique, Kramer lets the accused hang themselves in their own words. Verbatim classroom dialogue from the students who will soon mold America's youth makes a reader flinch: ``like'' as omnipresent modifier, ``neat'' as descriptive as in ``like it was kinda neat.'' Hours devoted to analyzing the values promoted in a book about Tootles the locomotive; adults leaping up in the middle of a class discussion to sing ``If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.'' According to Kramer, the language is not corrected, and the childish behavior is encouraged as an appropriate way to learn about children, because methodology—the how of teaching—is emphasized far beyond the what, the facts of math, science, and history. Frequently, the professors have a political agenda, usually egalitarian, which puts a premium on ``self-esteem,'' on ``success'' by no objective standard other than by how much a child has improved over his last effort. Clearly, Kramer also has her own agenda: She believes in raising standards in the classroom, jacking up levels of achievement, and returning content to the teaching curriculum. Meanwhile, she is not entirely insensitive to the problems that teachers face—the need to be social worker, substitute parent, and transmitter of values in addition to teaching—or to the problems that colleges face in training teachers to be so multifaceted. Kramer's call to improve schools of education is valid, but the constantly appalled tone, the repeated sarcasm and disapproval, the narrow focus make the call annoyingly off-key.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-917642-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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