Delightful as well as convincing in its plea that educators place learning over winnowing and access over exclusivity.
Compelling advice on how to improve education.
Now centuries old, the complaint that schools are factories, taking in students as raw material and churning out a standardized product, no longer serves, according to MIT professor Sarma, who prefers the term winnowing. A winnower blows air through unrefined matter, eliminating chaff, debris, and waste but also valuable material, producing a more homogenous end product. This baleful process began around 1900, when education theory and quasi-scientific methods ran off the track. The first intelligence tests were better at winnowing a subset of good learners than the previous methods (teachers’ opinions, personal connections), but they were based on the flawed notion that intelligence is fixed at birth, so “the main challenge facing schools was not to improve intelligence, but to separate the apt from the inept.” Tests also favored the privileged—e.g., “define regatta.” Sarma devotes parts of the book to the neuroscience of how the brain processes information and to psychology research that provides a solid basis for some educational strategies but has shot down more than one. Describing education today, the author does not take sides in the interminable debate over whether students should “follow their own impulses in determining what to learn, or…stick to topics their instructors deem important.” Rather, Sarma identifies what doesn’t work (the idea “that most students require specialized education media depending on their supposed brain makeup,” a theory that “lingers zombie-like in education culture despite a wealth of evidence against it”), hopeful dead ends, and the best of current techniques. The author is most partial to Montessori schools—though he notes that “the name ‘Montessori” is untrademarkable, and the degree to which schools stick to Maria Montessori’s time-honed methods varies wildly”—and high-tech, online programs, which are expensive and effective when a teacher is involved but cheap and ineffective without one.
Delightful as well as convincing in its plea that educators place learning over winnowing and access over exclusivity.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54182-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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