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THE RISE AND FALL OF ENGLISH

RECONSTRUCTING ENGLISH AS A DISCIPLINE

A middling effort to claim the culture wars' middle ground over the teaching of English in high schools, colleges, and universities. Scholes (Humanities/Brown Univ.) has seen enough in almost 50 years in the field of English to worry that it has hit its high point (somewhere between genteel early-20th-century literary appreciation and technical New Criticism) and will suffer the same declining fate as Classics or utter extinction like Belles Lettres. Before making his modest proposal, he objectively reviews English's evolution in American education, primarily at Brown and Yale, over the last two centuries as it absorbed Rhetoric and replaced Classics as the foundation of a humanist education. The new subject, however, was somewhat uncomfortable with assuming the mantle of civilization from Greek and Latin, and its teachers found grammar and composition infra dig while they established their academic hierarchy. By the time deconstruction had undermined the previous generation's assumptions about truth and meaning, this status quo had become all but immovable. Although Scholes (Protocols of Reading, not reviewed, etc.) is well versed in literary theory, he sees no solution in turning the undergraduate syllabus into ``a set of Great Theories, Great Theoreticians'' any more than enforcing a curriculum of Great Books Ö la E.D. Hirsch. Instead, he hopes that English can return to a more pragmatic basis, inculcating ``textual power,'' which he describes as ``the ability to understand and produce a wide variety of texts,'' whether in academe or on the job. Unfortunately, despite his work with an educational task force whose goal was to retool high-school English teaching, his basic pedagogic program, which covers ``texts'' from epic poetry to film and television, begs too many questions about why English is studied in the first place. An honest but ultimately muddled attempt to come down from English Lit's ivory tower and put theory into practice.

Pub Date: March 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-300-07151-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998

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INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION

THE DECLINE, THE DECEPTION, THE DOGMAS

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

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THE ABOLITION OF MAN

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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