An impassioned call for radical educational reform.
A scathing indictment of America’s educational system.
In this well-structured treatise, Tull (The Rise and Fall of the Unions’ Empire, 2013) gives an overview of what he sees as the sad state of affairs in American schools. In it, he offers a history of public education, a diagnosis of what he sees as its problems and “several choices to reverse the descending freefall.” Many readers may agree with him that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has been a colossal failure, with lots of unintended consequences. The author specifically criticizes the use of standardized testing as the ultimate indicator of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. As he flatly states, “Incentives based on student grades needs [sic] to be eliminated.” Some of his proposals, such as proper nutrition and increased parental responsibility, easily fall into the mainstream. He also advocates for giving parents and students more choices, among a wider network of options: “Charter schools, online schools, home-schools and private school voucher programs must become fully implemented.” However, some readers may question a few of his suggested corrective measures, such as the establishment of military schools for repeatedly disruptive students and mandatory uniforms for all. According to Tull, teachers’ unions must also accept a marked decrease in benefits and end the practice of granting tenure. The author hasn’t worked as an educator himself, so he relies upon a wide array of data and anecdotal evidence to support his claims. To that end, he provides an impressive array of statistics in appendices that comprise half the text. This data is perhaps the author’s most valuable contribution to the contentious debates surrounding educational reform, as it allows readers to compare the United States with other countries and to evaluate figures for individual states. He also includes a helpful key for acronyms and a list of recommended readings. Ultimately, although readers may find some of his arguments unconvincing, they’re nonetheless worthy of consideration.
An impassioned call for radical educational reform.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500482558
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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