Evenhanded, judicious, and observant: a valuable contribution to the literature of education.
A patient, open appraisal of today’s emphasis on computers in learning from Oppenheimer, whose story on the subject, published in the Atlantic Monthly, won him a National Magazine Award in 1997.
Twenty-five years after computers started to make inroads into the education of children, it’s appropriate to ask exactly what effect they have had on the intellectual development of American youth. Oppenheimer travels far afield—to Napa, the hill country of West Virginia, Texas, Maryland, Las Vegas—to measure the impact of computers, and his conclusions are both revealing and predictable. Computers really are a supplementary tool, valuable for word-processing or drawing information from the Web, but they are also costly, time-consuming, and mechanically vexing, plagued by a system that lacks teacher training and support service, and constrained by the inherent inflexibility of software. Oppenheimer doesn’t prefer the halcyon days of the three Rs, but he does question the evolution of American society’s slavish relationship with tools—from the tablet to the keyboard—in this case at the expense of downplaying education’s crucial people process. “[There] is limited, speculative, but intriguing material” on the ability of computers to fire students’ imaginations, but they will never replace the encouragement, nurturing, tutoring, and attentiveness of an energetic teacher. Nor will they create an atmosphere of high expectations, something that comes from people, especially ones who are “well trained but also sufficiently well paid.” To prosper, students need to think critically, have fertile and flexible imaginations, be able to listen and communicate, possess broad knowledge—and these traits come from “a handful of embarrassingly well known” elements: smaller classes, longer periods, time for teachers to prepare their lessons, exploratory reading, student collaboration, and help programs, not to mention full engagement on the home front.
Evenhanded, judicious, and observant: a valuable contribution to the literature of education.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-6044-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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