A mixture of alarm and hope, wisdom and portending.
An editor-at-large for the Chronicle of Higher Education surveys the sorry status of higher education.
Part analytical, part self-help, Selingo’s debut will please some and annoy others. The author begins with the case of a young woman with high hopes who dropped out (he uses numerous other such examples throughout), then commences his examination of all that’s gone wrong. Soaring costs, students who no longer learn the way traditional colleges teach, the resistance of many in academe to online learning, prospective families and students who don’t know what they really want from college, the course-credit tradition, grade inflation, the fashion now among many institutions to convert themselves into what he calls a “resort campus,” with amenities and frills that befuddle the older generations—all are contributing to the cracks in the foundations of the old four-year, residential model. Selingo cites numerous alarming statistics—only 20 percent of students, for example, attend a four-year college full time—and he discusses at length the question of the value of a college degree and the conflict between purely vocational aims/economic gains and pursuing a major and career that bring personal satisfaction. Throughout, he points to promising ideas some schools are trying: blending online with face-to-face courses (“hybrid” courses, he calls them), which permit students to finish at their own speed. Near the end, Selingo forecasts five changes—among them: more personalized education and fluid timelines. He ends both with a sample list of 18 schools with innovative ideas and a list of questions students and families should ask the schools they’re considering—e.g., “What is the job-placement rate of the college’s graduates? How is it calculated?”
A mixture of alarm and hope, wisdom and portending.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02707-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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