A sometimes illuminating survey of campus conflicts over bias and identity, based on interviews with 100 students, faculty, and administrators on 17 campuses. Sidel (Sociology/Hunter, On Her Own, 1989, etc.) begins promisingly, recalling the unspoken political and intellectual conformity of her 1950s college years. However, she loses momentum when she writes, in her somewhat turgid style, about two very broad topics: the historical debate over public education, and the current storm over multiculturalism and its attendant assertions of group identity (and the conflicts that often arise from them). Setting her context, Sidel offers sketches of campus incidents—a 1992 racial brawl at Michigan's Olivet College, a fraternity rape at the University of Rhode Island, and others. She goes on to profile students—including a black woman isolated on a white campus and Asian-Americans stereotyped as ``model minorities''—who have coped with bias, spoken out, and even become activists. Clearly, much insensitivity and clumsiness exists: As one student reports, professors like to ask a class's sole black student, ``So, what's the black perspective?'' Sidel's choices aren't all so predictable: She includes a conservative student, a student who sees class as more important than race, and a black student who opposes an ethnic studies requirement. But while she sensibly notes the limits of ``identity politics'' and competition among victims, her conclusions—pitting her heroic student activists against perpetrators of hate incidents—leave out the more complicated middle ground in the P.C. debates and in campus life. Moreover, her position on speech codes (free speech is good, but people should be more sensitive about what they say) is wishy-washy, and she shies from some investigations—for example, probing the differences in atmosphere between elite and nonelite campuses. Though Sidel does step beyond sound-bite reporting, fewer—and more thorough—case studies would have better explored the ironies and subtleties of this topic.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84112-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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