A useful though eminently debatable case for reform in the interest of teaching to today’s needs.
Former Harvard University president Bok examines ways in which higher education can shape better citizens.
The author looks back over seven decades of teaching to examine where tertiary education is and where it’s going. It’s now said that students retain little information from the lecture format, with better results coming from active participation rather than passive reception. Though in days past, Bok’s charges at Harvard filled the halls to hear the likes of Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Sandel, such talented interpreters are rare. All the same, “at least half of college faculty continue to lecture extensively, especially in large college courses, despite persuasive evidence that active forms of problem-solving are more effective at helping students learn to think carefully and reason well.” Meanwhile, writes the author, altogether too many professors resent teaching, and the more renowned the school, the stronger the dislike for it: “Their rewards from the outside world…come almost entirely from their research.” If universities are to weather the coming financial and cultural storms, Bok suggests, they’ll need to retool to offer answers to real exigencies, such as the fact that employers (and donors) complain that students emerging with diplomas lack “soft” or “noncognitive” skills such as a willingness to work as a member of a team and observe basic social niceties. More to the point, Bok also argues that institutions must do more to teach beyond mere rubrics, touching especially on questions of ethics and civic engagement, and point the way to how students might acquire “wisdom enough to decide how to live purposeful, fulfilling lives” and prepare themselves for lifelong learning. Whether faculties will want to take the time to produce “active and informed citizens” remains to be seen, notes the author, and such faculties tend to serve their own interests.
A useful though eminently debatable case for reform in the interest of teaching to today’s needs.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-20580-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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