A nifty case study of the tangled trail—from policy idea to law—of the bill that established the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993, the program known as AmeriCorps. Waldman, a national correspondent for Newsweek, decided to adapt the magazine's ``inside story'' approach to presidential races and apply it to an examination of one campaign promise. He chose national service because he thought it typified Clinton's vision and tested his ``expansive idealism and aggressive pragmatism.'' Waldman's thorough narrative of the un-pretty process profiles policy aides, lobbyists, and bureaucrats to show how pressure and politics, more than logic, shaped the final bill. The centrist Democratic Leadership Council (which Clinton helped found) had long advocated a required national service that would be a civilian analogue of the military draft. But candidate Clinton sugared the plan by proposing a service corps made up of volunteers who would receive college-tuition aid. The mix of service and reward, of community obligation and governmental activism, stirred campaign audiences, but the proposal got little scrutiny. Clinton wanted a $9.4 billion program over five years, but he ended up with a $1.5 billion program over three years after the bill went through a Mixmaster of interests, including banks, students, unions, and veterans. Congressional debate, the author notes, focused on whether loans should be directed through universities rather than on the more complex issue of how long students should make percentage-of-income repayments. Nor was another vital Clinton interest—the role of national service in fostering diversity- -debated. Waldman deplores the follies involved but still finds the proposal a rare, even noble, federal endeavor. A more lively tale of early Clintonism than some of the recent overviews.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85300-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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