Of some interest to curriculum-reform advocates and policy planners but without the fire and grace of Ivan Illich, Neil...
Public education is underfunded and undervalued. An education expert and a venture capitalist look to improve the situation.
In the spirit of creative destruction—as opposed to the mere destruction wrought by state legislatures everywhere—Harvard Innovation Lab’s “Expert in Residence” Wagner (Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, 2012, etc.) and venture capitalist Dintersmith argue that we must make the system more appropriate to the needs of the present era. Gone are the summer breaks and civics lectures of yore; in are scenarios in which students “attack meaningful, engaging challenges” and “form their own points of view.” For all its good points and positive intent, this book is mostly bullet lists and screened boxes, tables and charts, with a tediously long windup before a pitch is ever thrown. When that pitch is delivered, it lands pretty solidly: yes, education is a mess, and yes, retooling parts of the system are in order. But get down to it, and things get arguable. If an apprenticeship in auto mechanics involves a working knowledge of how an engine is assembled and the functions of its constituent parts, then why shouldn’t a class in English discuss how a sentence works? Not on the authors’ watch, for by their account, “teachers spend an inordinate amount of time teaching the mechanics of writing—parts of speech, grammar, spelling, punctuation—without giving students any reason whatsoever to want to write.” Wagner and Dintersmith’s program would seem to be Horace Mann’s industrial education refocused for the post-knowledge-worker set, the argument often repetitive and plaintive: “We tell our kids that they will be abject failures without a high school diploma, but fail to provide them with relevant or engaging challenges during their four years in high school.”
Of some interest to curriculum-reform advocates and policy planners but without the fire and grace of Ivan Illich, Neil Postman, and others.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0431-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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