Rating: 
Summary: Not "Inside American Education"
Review: Thomas Sowell's *Inside American Education* is a very curious book. While it purports to be about education in general, the lion's share (143 pages out of 285) treats colleges and universities. It is of course easy to find things in colleges that look silly, and Sowell has done just that, but what these things mean is another, far more difficult issue. (No one now need read anything on the problem of race and college education but *The Shape of the River. Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions* by William G. Bowen, Derek Bok, Glenn C. Loury.) The provocative chapters on pre-college education are by comparison thin, focused exclusively on sometimes nasty attacks on the competence of teachers, the so-called "brainwashing" Sowell sees as the sole purpose of many educational programs, and the "dogmas" he believes determine the content of pre-college education.The research supporting his theses is shoddy, to say the least. Given the book's title it is ironic that Sowell gives not the slightest indication that he has ever spent so much as a second actually inside a classroom. He has evidently read no actual curricula, talked to no actual teachers or students, sat through no actual classes. He apparently hired a research assistant to screen instructional films, but the only discussion of a film in the book derives from someone else's remarks. He grossly misrepresents the sex education book for teens *Changing Bodies, Changing Lives*. His claim that various education programs amount to brainwashing is simply laughable; he produces not one shred of evidence to support it, nor can he provide a single plausible motivation for the vast left-wing conspiracy that he sees behind these programs. One could go on, but the short of it is that anyone who wants to learn about education in America would be well advised to look elsewhere.
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