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Loading... Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mindby Gerald Graff
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I appreciate Graff''s cogent call for explicit teaching of rhetoric and the machinery of academia ( )A book-length argument for some relatively commonsense principles: students learn better when they understand a context for what they're learning; instructors have a duty to try to bridge the gap between academic language and the vernacular; student papers are better when they have a sense that they're arguing *against* someone rather than into a vacuum. Valid points, certainly: but as someone mostly convinced of these points on my way in, I found the rhetorical exertion on display here to be essentially skimmable. Graff's book certainly made me look anew at the educational systems within which I, as a student, move every day, and many of his comments and insights resonated deeply with me. But this book could have been about two-thirds shorter, as he repeats himself so frequently -- perhaps taking his own advice to write as clearly as possible by "tell[ing] 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell[ing] 'em, tell[ing] 'em what you told them" a little _too_ seriously. The ideas are good; the prose rambles more than is really necessary. 0.045 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0300105142, Paperback)Our schools and colleges often make the intellectual life seem more impenetrable, narrowly specialized, and inaccessible than it is or needs to be, argues this eminent scholar and educator, whose provocative book offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more readily understandable. “Graff is reopening the door on a major debate. In the wake of theory, in the wake of feminism, post-colonial criticism and all the rest, what is a liberal arts education supposed to be about? How should teachers teach? What should students learn? Intelligently, humanely, Gerald Graff is bringing all of these questions back home to the classroom, which, at least for now, seems exactly where they belong.”—Mark Edmundson, Washington Post Book World “['Graff] writes with lucidity and charm. . . . A worthwhile work.”—Steven Lagerfeld, Wall Street Journal “Clueless in Academe is charming. . . . The reader chuckles in recognition over the tales told of scholars and students.”—Terence Kealey, The Times Higher Education Supplement (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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