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UP THE UNIVERSITY

RECREATING HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA

The brothers Solomon—Robert (Philosophy/Univ. of Texas at Austin; A Passion for Justice, 1990, etc.) and Jon (Classics/Univ. of Arizona)—take a bracingly common-sensical approach—in the form of 137 sermonettes—to the problems everybody agrees are dogging the American university. Briskly eschewing the theoretical baggage of Allan Bloom and Charles Sykes, the authors argue that American universities, for all their energy and resourcefulness, have lost sight of their primary mission—undergraduate education—in the name of will-o'-the-wisp prestige and fat outside grants for research that, however valuable, often have scant connection to that educational mission. ``Professors are now for sale,'' the Solomons announce in the manner of Ross Perot, and they have plenty of homespun suggestions on how to bring the sheep and their straying shepherds back to the fold. Some of these are surprisingly persuasive: Require administrators to teach; hire students as tutors and advisors; end the ``five-year fraud'' that keeps so many students in college, paying out tuition, past their nominal graduation date. Other proposals, however, sound eccentric or cranky: Mandate open admissions in all state schools; discourage most high-school students from going on directly to college; replace tenured appointments with five-year contracts; abolish departments, course requirements, teaching awards, and used-book sales. There's something here to offend just about everyone—the authors' pamphleteering strain becomes coarsest in their remarks about English departments, those hotbeds of factitious political debate—but their deepest rancor is reserved for professional administrators, who come off looking like hired guns whose cupidity is equalled only by their ineptness. The Solomons' solution? Return university governance to the faculty while riding those wastrels out of town on a rail. A commonplace book more full of sound bites than a political convention: perfect bedside reading for academics who want to drift off to sleep believing that they really can make a difference in recalling the education business to its true vocation.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-201-57719-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992

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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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