Two grumpy professors wring their hands over the current state of higher education. Willimon, dean of the Chapel at Duke Univ., and Naylor, an emeritus professor of economics at Duke, disturbed by what they perceived to be the moral deterioration of contemporary undergraduate life, decided to team-teach a freshman seminar in 1991. The course, called ``The Search for Meaning,'' serves as the basis for this book. In it, the authors bemoan the genuine problems of our current generation of undergraduates: more alcohol abuse than ever, a destructive attitude toward sex, too little appreciation of the intellectual life. But they get a bit hysterical: ``Too many teachers teach too little, and students take too few courses. The prevailing values on college campuses are individualism, hedonism, and anti-intellectualism.'' Universities that are too large, too impersonal, and overly focused on research have undone the bond of friendship between teacher and student, say Willimon and Naylor. Professors have lost sight of their true mission, which is to instill in undergraduate students a sense of moral orientation in the world. How are we to recover our bearings? Unexpectedly, the answer comes from GM and IBM: radical downsizing, first of all. But we must also abolish fraternities, sororities, and tenure, andso we must assumeteach more courses like theirs. ``The Search for Meaning'' is an omnium-gatherum of readings from ``philosophy, religion, psychotherapy, literature, and fine arts.'' It is the sort of class that undergraduates usually refer to as ``gut,'' i.e., sure to produce a good grade if you regularly show up with a serious expression on your face. They advocate teaching on Saturdays and early in the morning as a way of keeping the lid on hedonistic student cavorting in barroom and bedroom. An unconvincing de profundis.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8028-4119-8
Page Count: 136
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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