Newsworthy, but too dense for the general reader.
Karabel’s strenuously detailed, sometimes repetitive examination of admissions policies at Ivy League schools shows that the history of America’s top universities is steeped in systematic discrimination against Jews and minorities.
Graduates of the top three schools run the country, and therefore the world; Karabel (Sociology/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley) notes that, by 2008, when George W. Bush is set to complete his second term, graduates of the big three will have occupied the White House for 47 of the 104 years he covers here. The author sees admissions policies at America’s top schools as “exceedingly strange” compared to the rest of the world. How did the schools arrive at a highly subjective process that weighs academics, athleticism, lineage, class and character? Well, it wasn’t always so. Until the 1920s, most major universities based admissions solely on academic distinction. Then, amid a national wave of immigration reform, the upper-crust schools overhauled their policies to have a more well-rounded student body, by which they meant one including not too many Jews. While the fight over admissions occasionally boiled over in public, Karabel makes his case most persuasively—and exhaustively—through internal reports and correspondence. Though it can hardly be overstated, the institutional anti-Semitism is a note Karabel plinks past the point of exhaustion. At least as interesting is his look at the rise of meritocracy, gender equality and the push by the schools’ faculties for more of a voice in the process during the Cold War race for technological dominance.
Newsworthy, but too dense for the general reader.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-57458-1
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
