A collection of previously published articles in which the author takes on established notions or "pseudo-ideas" in a way guaranteed to create controversy. He does not accept the current fashions, but probes questioningly for reality, eschewing sham and "in" concepts. He always holds to the essential truth—children can learn if those charged with this responsibility are working on the real problems. He has little patience with the empire builders and has trenchant things to say about IQs and their use, black children, colleges, intellectuals and tuition tax credits. Much of what he professes is based on extensive research, and whether he bursts a favorite balloon or disagrees with one's pet dogmas, he is a challenging warrior in a field choked with clic‚s. Sowell's cogent arguments are not easily dismissed. He is old-fashioned in the sense that he believes schools can work well in the worst ghetto. He has seen students learn whom many would have given up on. He is sober and unfashionable, but qualified to state that there need be no "special" way to reach black children in order to have quality education. Give them structure, interested and demanding staff and get rid of the small percentage that threaten to destroy the potential of the majority. Many will be uncomfortable, even furious, at the way he debunks unexamined shibboleths of the educational establishment. However, he is an incisive critic, and until there are some reasonable answers to his questions, trouble looms. A rewarding collection for those prepared to read it with an open mind.
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1985
ISBN: 0817981128
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Hoover Institution
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985
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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