A potpourri of previously published articles and lectures, as well as chapters written specifically for this book—all explaining what the theory of multiple intelligences is and how it can be applied in today's schools. A decade ago, Gardner (Education/Harvard; The Unschooled Mind, 1991, etc.) put forward the idea that intelligence should be measured in more ways than through verbal and math tests that are standard for schools. He postulated seven basic ``intelligences,'' including language and logical-mathematical but also kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and spatial. Gardner gives all seven equal weight—but schools and testing institutions don't. Hence, children who are weak in language and math skills but strong in musical or interpersonal ``intelligence'' will suffer in the traditional classroom. Here, the author attempts to show how schools can address those differences so that students will be happier, more productive, and more able to cope with life. Except for a chapter on the Key School in Indianapolis, which has built its curriculum and method of teaching around multiple intelligences, teachers and administrators won't find a how-to on restructuring their classrooms here. Look to apprentice and museum programs and to the community for that, says Gardner (somewhat vaguely), leaving schools' options wide open. Strongest here are discussions of how to reframe testing and assessment methods and of how the limited view of intelligence can defeat both student and teacher. Research at Harvard's Project Zero (which Gardner directs) has developed new assessment materials, explained here, that help to measure all seven intelligences. Repetitious, thanks to its format; but even so a good introduction, along with Gardner's Frames of Mind (1983), to the theory of multiple intelligences.
Pub Date: March 31, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-01821-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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