An argument for learning as a process of personal growth, keyed to the ambitions of those who can afford it.
What is school for?
The authors of this manifesto argue that the goal of learning is “mastery”—the ability to take knowledge and direct it to the goals of personal advancement and social change. They outline three features of mastery learning. First, the focus of teaching should be “the development of essential and enduring cognitive and character skills needed for work, citizenship, and personal growth.” Second, success in learning charts how students can “use the skills and knowledge they have learned.” Third, schools should build “character skills” as “an integral element of the learning process.” The authors write in a breathless, revelatory style, somewhere between a Silicon Valley product rollout and a TED talk. Their approach fits well with the ideals of upper-middle-class American ambition: Don’t just succeed but become a better person and improve society in the process. Project-based learning becomes one pathway to reimagining the relationship between education and work. “Build a plan, implement it, and share with the community what [you have] learned and accomplished.” They offer a series of case studies of schools where students “become advocates for the land and its people….How do I build that confident cultural identity?” Such a question may motivate parents and their children in the rarified communities of social awareness. For the increasing number of first-generation students entering higher education, for adults looking to retrain for new careers, or for parents awestruck at the increasing costs of college, this book may offer little in the way of practical advice. For a nation increasingly skeptical of expertise, it will do little to convince Americans that knowledge is a good thing.
An argument for learning as a process of personal growth, keyed to the ambitions of those who can afford it.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781541601925
Page Count: -
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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