An academic's meandering foray into the realms of the preliterate. Sanders (English and the History of Ideas/Pitzer College) fears for the fate of the printed word. Beginning with a history of literacy, he presents the ancient Greeks as the primary example of a people with a limited, verbal culture who flowered with their adaptation of the Semitic alphabet, which he contends not only allowed for superior intergenerational communication but also for the critical thinking that made Greek philosophy and ethics possible. Moving from human history to human development, the author posits that infants and people deprived of language cannot perceive in the abstract and are incapable of morality. He skates on thinner ice when he suggests that people stuck in verbal cultures, especially the functional illiterates of our inner cities, are a mindless, amoral mob. Here the humanities professor shows gaps in his hard and social science reading: Few of America's 70 million illiterates display the conscienceless violence of the sociopaths he fearfully describes. Displaying tinges of Eurocentrism when diagnosing the social problems of certain hyphenated Americans, Sanders also links illiteracy to feminism- -mothers not staying home to feed their children constant verbal stimulation. ``Among humans only women educate'' is a line that would resonate better were the author less obsessed with unproven theories about breast-feeding and the development of literacy. A volley fired at technology in general and computers specifically reads: ``Word processors have turned everyone into ghostwriters, so that technology...has sucked the very essence out of life.'' While TV and video games have pedagogic limitations, the author does not successfully demonstrate why trashy novels are better than classic films, why the confines of grammar are less stifling than the parameters of a video game, or why a TV show represents ``a shift from the human to the technical.'' A few pearls among the paranoia, but this flawed paean to literacy is as awkward as its title.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41711-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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
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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