Egginton provides a helpful diagnosis of why today’s college students are divided. Unfortunately, the author’s own sowing of...
A cri de couer regarding the modern university.
In The Closing of the American Mind (1987), philosopher Allan Bloom criticized the nation’s colleges and universities for fostering the notion of moral relativism instead of critical thinking and the pursuit of truth. More than 30 years later, Egginton (Humanities/Johns Hopkins Univ.; The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World, 2016, etc.) delivers a sequel of sorts, arguing that “we are in danger of losing our civic culture.” The flourishing of identity politics on campuses, while rightly providing much-needed benefits to marginalized groups, has led to a balkanization of our students at the expense of any sense of community. The roots of this problem can be traced to rises in individualism and inequality and a decline in civic discourse that have fractured society as a whole. The proper remedy, writes the author, is a return to a true liberal arts education, accessible to all and rooted in the ideas of equality and opportunity. No one observing the nation’s campuses in recent years would disagree with Egginton’s main diagnosis: Our students are splintering and refusing to listen to each other. Yet the author makes some divisive statements himself—e.g., efforts to repeal the estate tax are “un-American,” and modern-day cultural conservatives are comparable to members of “whites only” country clubs of yore—and his points often lack context or are misleading. Several times, he cites the dubious statistic that one in four or five college women are sexually assaulted during their time at university; the author admits that “the statistic has been widely debated and there may in fact be no way of knowing the actual numbers.” His assertion that a liberal arts education is “availably only to the wealthiest few” is an exaggeration, as evidenced by need-based scholarships, the G.I. bill, and other programs.
Egginton provides a helpful diagnosis of why today’s college students are divided. Unfortunately, the author’s own sowing of discord will do little to unite them.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-133-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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