A collection of original essays on the troubling impact of government policies and the Cold War on the American university. In 1945, as Chomsky, MIT linguist and left-wing political gadfly, points out, "the United States had a level of preponderance in the international sphere which probably had no counterpart in history," largely due to the country's transformation during WW II. The war had also reshaped the once distant relationship between the federal government and the university into a close partnership, and the nation's developing rivalry with its erstwhile Soviet ally gave the academy (and especially its scientists) a new importance in American life. Noted Harvard biologist Lewontin portrays the relationship as a Faustian bargain in which the university, and scholars in strategic disciplines like applied sciences and political studies, derived new wealth, power, and prestige from government largesse. But the ultimate result of government money, he suggests, was the vitiation of the moral independence of the academy. He further asserts that this close relationship persists, now heavily rationalized by institutions grown used to wealth and influence. Other writers discuss the impact of Cold War culture on their own disciplines: Historian Howard Zinn argues that the public conflict between repression and resistance in the 1950s and '60s mirrors the conflict between scholarly commitment to the truth and pressures to write history along the lines of official propaganda. Richard Oehman discusses the politicization of the teaching of English during the Cold War and Laura Nader the imposition of Cold War priorities on research in anthropology. The writers generally approach their subject from an avowedly left-wing perspective, and the writing is in places obscure and jargon-laden; however, the authors do a service in exploring a topic too little examined but fraught with importance for modern American cultural life.
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1997
ISBN: 1-56584-005-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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