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IMMEASURABLE OUTCOMES

TEACHING SHAKESPEARE IN THE AGE OF THE ALGORITHM

An edifying and inspiring argument for the imperishable value of a liberal education.

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Greene offers a spirited defense of a liberal education not reducible to quantitative assessments.

The author, a literary critic and professor emerita at Scripps College, observes that society has lost its faith in the power of liberal education, once understood as the surest path to the “cultivation of the human and the creation of a citizenry capable of democracy.” Greene notes that the institution was once cherished for training students in the responsible stewardship of one’s own freedom. However, the tide of opinion has turned against it in recent years, caricaturing it as feckless navel-gazing; now decision-makers want unambiguously measurable results, usually of the kind that point to economic progress. But quantitative rubrics are incapable of measuring the fundamentally ineffable—including the manifold benefits yielded by an education in the humanities and the magic of a professor’s personal interactions with their students.Instead of “accountability,” an anodyne bureaucratic word that “refers to something that can be calculated, measured, as in a tallying up, keeping score,” Greene prefers to prioritize “responsibility,” a term that implies responsiveness and engagement and suggests the obligations teachers and students have to each other and to themselves. Without such a perspective, those who join the workforce are missing the bigger picture, a point powerfully made by the author: “Checking off boxes gets you doctors who can read numbers on a screen but can’t hear what a patient is saying; architects who fail to imagine how a housing project affects a neighborhood; engineers who fail to ask how a dam affects the population downstream; software makers who have no idea if their program can be used by nonexperts.”

Greene furnishes the reader with a concrete example of the responsibility she prizes by discussing her teaching of Shakespeare (depicted in a “composite of many classes” the author taught over the course of 40 years at Scripps College). Greene convincingly demolishes the benighted obsession with formulaic teaching assessments and astutely limns the nature of the classroom experience, a “relationship, a crisscross of relationships, two-ways, multiple ways, fraught with the complexities that come with a relationship, times ten, times a thousand.” This is the principal virtue of the book: an aversion to approaches that lack nuance or depth; Greene admirably refuses to succumb to the currents of the time. Moreover, her defense of the humanities as a devotion to an endless fascination with all things human is as philosophically rigorous as it is affectingly impassioned. At the crux of that argument is the formidable figure of Shakespeare, the “heart of humanism.” Greene writes, “I came away feeling, that’s what we love about Shakespeare, he makes us feel good about being human. It was a feeling more than a thought, a flash more than a feeling. I don’t know how else to say it, just glad to be a part of it, humanity in all its silliness, splendor, squalor, sordidness, grandeur, outrageousness.” This is an important contribution to today’s education debates and a sterling example of the intellectual virtues it valorizes. An edifying and inspiring argument for the imperishable value of a liberal education.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9781421444604

Page Count: 384

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: March 17, 2023

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ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS

A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.

An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.

“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-­decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”

A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025

ISBN: 9780593804148

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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