Of some interest to curriculum-reform advocates and policy planners but without the fire and grace of Ivan Illich, Neil...
Public education is underfunded and undervalued. An education expert and a venture capitalist look to improve the situation.
In the spirit of creative destruction—as opposed to the mere destruction wrought by state legislatures everywhere—Harvard Innovation Lab’s “Expert in Residence” Wagner (Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, 2012, etc.) and venture capitalist Dintersmith argue that we must make the system more appropriate to the needs of the present era. Gone are the summer breaks and civics lectures of yore; in are scenarios in which students “attack meaningful, engaging challenges” and “form their own points of view.” For all its good points and positive intent, this book is mostly bullet lists and screened boxes, tables and charts, with a tediously long windup before a pitch is ever thrown. When that pitch is delivered, it lands pretty solidly: yes, education is a mess, and yes, retooling parts of the system are in order. But get down to it, and things get arguable. If an apprenticeship in auto mechanics involves a working knowledge of how an engine is assembled and the functions of its constituent parts, then why shouldn’t a class in English discuss how a sentence works? Not on the authors’ watch, for by their account, “teachers spend an inordinate amount of time teaching the mechanics of writing—parts of speech, grammar, spelling, punctuation—without giving students any reason whatsoever to want to write.” Wagner and Dintersmith’s program would seem to be Horace Mann’s industrial education refocused for the post-knowledge-worker set, the argument often repetitive and plaintive: “We tell our kids that they will be abject failures without a high school diploma, but fail to provide them with relevant or engaging challenges during their four years in high school.”
Of some interest to curriculum-reform advocates and policy planners but without the fire and grace of Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, and others.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0431-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
A somewhat fictionalized account of Minahan's semester at Brown ``in the early 1980's.'' There, as an adjunct lecturer, he taught a writing course called ``Democracy and Education,'' in which students discussed texts from the Declaration of Independence to the writings of E.D. Hirsch, and subjects from race, class, and gender to the ills of society. The students here are composites—allegorical types: the lazy, the passionate, the idealistic, the methodical, the manipulative, the arrogant, the silent; Ray, Toshiro, Pete, Rahjiv, Helga, and Juanita—the sort of cultural array that admissions officers fantasize about. Meanwhile, Minahan is critical of contemporary ideology; of political correctness, as well as of the DWM (dead white male) curriculum; of the cultural poverty of ``American education'' and ``college students today'' (who don't know Latin or the meaning of ``transcendentalism''); of a system that hires black women without Ph.D.s while he's unemployed (``Shit''); and of the ultimate disease—greed—the ``American illness'' perpetuated on campuses. But he likes his own students, plus Allan Bloom and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and he advocates compassion (``the only idea that makes any sense'')—which he defines in increasingly general ways until concluding that ``the society we get is the society we deserve.'' But while Minahan criticizes US education- -students, faculty, the MLA—his book offers neither cogent analysis nor solutions but, ironically, is itself symptomatic of a problem. Hired to teach writing, the author presents opinions as truth, ideology as ideas, polemic as rhetoric, cultural diagnoses as ``personal essays,'' stereotypes as style. If he were one of his students, Minahan probably would find that his own writing—replete with generalizations, shifting voice (the implicative ``we'' and accusing ``you''), and lack of discipline—would earn him a recommendation to change his major.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-883285-01-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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