I read a lot, but there is no book I have reread as much as Dumbing Down. The editors--Wasburn and Thornton - have chosen their twenty-five essays with such care that one hardly minds he is in pretty well-walked over territory: the attack on zany feminism, the indecipherable mission of current secondary school curricula, the total surrender of English departments in their once noble chore of trying to teach composition, MTV as felt thought, postmodernism, and the now arcane epistemology of once what was an accessible field-- the social sciences. To this last field, the essayist and Chair of the Department of Sociology of City College, City University of New York, Steven Goldberg, shares with the reader what he calls a "haggis of overwritten nonsense" common to introductory texts:



We need a language that enables us to perpetually and conceptually

negotiate our way between sameness and opposition,

that permits the recognition of kinship in difference and difference

among kin; a language that encodes respect for difference,

particularly , alterity without repudiating the underlying

affinity that is the first prerequisite for knowledge (98).





Every essay is as well written as Goldberg's and equal to the task of allowing the target to blow himself up with his own petard. Thus, if the postmodern scene is not quite to your liking -- but you never knew quite why-- these twenty-five essayists will give you the compass.

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