Plenty to ponder in this forceful, solid report on the shifting climate of American higher education.
New York Review of Books contributor and former university professor Hacker (Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men, 2003, etc.) and New York Times columnist Dreifus (Interview, 2003, etc.) present their combined “vision for higher education.”
The authors believe that many colleges are sacrificing purpose and priority in favor of “self-interested management,” misguided professors and a disrespect (by instructors themselves) for the precious art of teaching. They cite the tenure process as one of the reasons professors appear lackadaisical and disillusioned about their craft, along with slumping salaries (“higher education knows that low-cost labor is there”) and becoming engulfed by the “multiversity” (educational “behemoths” with a much wider, unrestrained focus). Fiscally influenced collegiate leadership is partially at fault for this, the authors write, along with a tiered, hierarchy class system of instructors, a problem that Dreifus, an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia University, experienced firsthand when her prized office space was indifferently eliminated. The authors note that, compared to a generation ago, tuitions at both public and private schools have “more than doubled.” They question whether the education offered is, therefore, twice as good, especially at more esteemed Ivy League universities. At colleges around the country, Hacker and Dreifus expose poorly assessed teaching skills, a general deficiency in personal attentiveness to students and the changing landscape of degree majors and student demographics, and they offer damning commentary on the machinations of intercollegiate athletics. If their dense, comprehensive analysis has a weakness, it’s the overwhelming amount of factual information wedged into the narrative. Around these facts and figures, however, a valid argument takes shape about the problematic causes behind increasingly unaffordable college tuitions. Hacker and Dreifus effectively, and wittily, present their contemporary dilemma, and closing chapters focus on their choices for best colleges (MIT, Notre Dame, “Ole Miss” et al) alongside intelligent, practical solutions to the college conundrum.
Plenty to ponder in this forceful, solid report on the shifting climate of American higher education.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8734-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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