Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

In this powerful, eloquent, and timely book, Jacques Barzun offers guidance for resolving the crisis in America's schools and colleges. Drawing on a lifetime of distinguished teaching, he issues a clear call to action for improving what goes on in America's classrooms. The result is an extraordinarily fresh, sensible, and practical program for better schools.

"It is difficult to imagine a more pungent, perceptive or eloquent commentary on contemporary American education than this collection of 15 pieces by Jacques Barzun."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Barzun's style is elegant, distinctive, philosophically consistent and much better-humored than that of many contemporary invective-hurlers."—David Alexander, New York Times Book Review

Mechanized classroom methods and gimmicks are no substitute for the hard work of learning and the art of teaching. That straightforward message shines through these 15 essays and articles (most of them previously published) by eminent cultural historian Barzun ( The American University ) and edited by Philipson, director of the Univeristy of Chicago Press. The Columbia emeritus professor gives a flunking grade to multiple-choice tests, a "game of choosing the ready-made." He views the modern textbook ("its closest analog . . . a travel brochure") as typical of the way students are "fed in small mouthfuls," and he dismisses numerous curriculum fads as a sop to pupils' restlessness and short attention spans. Trenchant and challenging, this primer holds valuable lessons for educators at all levels. While our public schools are breeding grounds for an army of functional illiterates our universities are becoming assembly lines, observes Barzun. He calls for the abolition of "slave labor" whereby poorly paid graduate students teach undergrads, and for the elimination of the "publish-or-perish" syndrome that has led to reams of "junk research."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This book gathers the various writings and comments of outspoken educator Barzun ( The American University , LJ 10/1/68), regarding the ailing American educational system. These freshly edited articles and essays offer a way out of a decaying system through teaching and learning in an old-fashioned way, rather than through the "radical innovations" of the so-called educational reformers. Some of the topics Barzun addresses include the inadequate ways in which reading is taught; the demeaning methods of teacher training; the counterfeit "social studies" programs which are the offshoot of combined geography and history curriculums; the benefits of reading the classics; and the effects of television on learning. In this collection one will find what schools and colleges should and could be if reforms are to "begin here." This is a practical, positive approach to developing better schools and colleges.
- Samuel T. Huang, Northern Illinois Univ. Libs., DeKalb
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.