An often-charming love letter to a storied institution, but offered with a grain of salt.
What happens when your high-school crush isn’t another student, but the high school itself?
Klein (Beast of Love, 2006, etc.), a reporter for the Washington Post and an alumnus of New York’s acclaimed Stuyvesant public high school, spent a semester roaming the halls of his alma mater, hanging with the students, dressing like them and observing their mating and academic habits. No, this is not the plot of Never Been Kissed. Klein was looking for the secret to Stuyvesant’s astounding academic success (the school, as Klein points out several times, has produced four Nobel Laureates). And indeed, Stuyvesant, an institution to which students from all over New York City may apply, has achieved remarkable things: It’s reported that at a time when math and science classes are being cut from schools around the country, Stuyvesant maintains an outstanding program. The author’s admiration for the school often results in a portrait of the students that verges on the hagiographic: There’s the star football player and A student who does homework until 4:00 in the morning every night, the ten-year-old math prodigy and his brilliant college-dropout mentor, the romantically portrayed heroin-addicted poet who maintains an above-average GPA. But Klein isn’t entirely the class cheerleader. He dispels the illusion that the school is open to anyone (while any student can take the entrance exam, not everyone can afford the years of tutoring that many parents pay for in order to prepare their children for the test). Klein’s descriptions of the pressures that students face is also chilling. Parents hound children for slipping a fraction of a grade point, students sleep little, teachers load on homework. The most intense pressure seems to come from the students themselves—when one girl starts a petition to reduce homework loads over school vacations, virtually none of the student body agrees to sign it.
An often-charming love letter to a storied institution, but offered with a grain of salt.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9944-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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