The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society [Paperback]

Heather Mac Donald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2001

Critics have attacked the foolishness of some of today's elite thought from many angles, but few have examined the real-world consequences of those ideas. In The Burden of Bad Ideas, Heather Mac Donald reports on their disastrous effects throughout our society. At a Brooklyn high school, students perfect their graffiti skills for academic credit. An Ivy League law professor urges blacks to steal from their employers. Washington bureaucrats regard theft by drug addicts as evidence of disability, thereby justifying benefits. Public health officials argue that racism and sexism cause women to get AIDS. America's premier monument to knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution, portrays science as white man's religion. Such absurdities, Ms. Mac Donald argues, grow out of a powerful set of ideas that have governed our public policy for decades, the product of university faculties and a professional elite who are convinced that America is a deeply unjust society. And while these beliefs have damaged the nation as a whole, she observes, they have hit the poor especially hard. Her reports trace the transformation of influential opinion-makers (such as the New York Times) and large philanthropic foundations from confident advocates of individual responsibility, opportunity, and learning into apologists for the welfare state. In a series of closely reported stories from the streets of New York to the seats of intellectual power, The Burden of Bad Ideas reveals an upside-down world and how it got that way.

Editorial Reviews

Review

If there were any justice in the world, Mac Donald would be knee-deep in Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards for her pioneering work. (Brooks, David Weekly Standard )

A startlingly valuable book, whether you lean left or right. (Michael Pakenham Baltimore Sun )

Spirited, stimulating, eloquent...The Burden of Bad Ideas is social, cultural, and political criticism of the first order. (Jonathan Yardley Washington Post )

Among discussions of urban malaise, where so much hot air has been recycled, this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze. (Allen D. Boyer New York Times )

Insightful, articulate, provocative, and most importantly, valid. (Richard Lamm Wall Street Journal )

Mac Donald is the indispensable journalist...if you question that characterization, you havenít read her work. (Will, George )

From the Publisher

7 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (July 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566633966
• ISBN-13: 978-1566633963
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Abdication of Authority, March 11, 2001

By 

Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Hardcover)

The essays in Heather Mac Donald's collection are all provocative, if not inflammatory, with the most ironically insightful her piece on reforming the contemporary American school system, "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach." Mac Donald suggests the system may neither need nor even be open to meaningful reform since it is the perfect complement for certain modern parents' methods of child-raising and for the biases spread by teacher education programs. If children are raised as imperial selves whose willfulness is to be cherished and whose behavior is not to be shaped by adult expectations, by the time such ineducable "students" reach school it is no surprise that professional "facilitators" will turn necessity into a virtue and create child-centered classrooms, spaces in which the clueless, still freed from adult authority, will lead the inept. Such parents and such educators, mutually abdicating authority to the wise child, are taking in each other's laundry, and what is there to reform, since all the key players are or should be happy? Mac Donald's are surely more important considerations than those of money, class size or computers in the classroom, and we owe her credit for calling our attention away from such palliatives to a pondering of the actual, though infrequently discussed, sentimental, anti-intellectual goals of our current schools.

68 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Alice in Constructivist land, November 16, 2001

By 

Melissa L. Shogren (Redmond, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Hardcover)

I recently began a teacher's certification course here in the Seattle area. Our course on Learning has focused on group discussions, group camraderie building, doing skits on learning, and how we "feel" about our experiences with children. The professor also proudly stated that she was only going to discuss the Constructivist view on learning because that was the ONLY approach to learning. I thought I was going insane. Was I back at summer camp? How could an upper level college class be so trivial? So narrow-minded? How could it be so divorced from the real world of classroom teaching? After reading Ms. MacDonald's book, I now realize that this Constructivist (all knowledge is relative, students construct their own knowledge) approach to teacher training is more common than one would think. Although the essay "Why Johnnie's Teachers Can't Teach" was written in the mid 1990's, it is as if MacDonald teleported herself into the future, observed how my Learning class was being taught, teleported herself back to the 1990's and then wrote the essay based on what she saw in 2001. It is almost spooky how the author's details about "Constructivist" college classrooms are so descriptive of what I am experiencing now. Future teachers read this book before you choose where to receive teacher certification. I would have given this book 5 stars, but it really needs a bibliography.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Punctures the Balloon of the Air-Headed Ideologues, December 25, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Paperback)

There have been other books exposing: (a) the terrible consequences of radical and multicultural theories and the arrogance of the obtuse people who believe in them; and (b) the journalists who act as unpaid cheerleaders for these activists, dispensing a picture of reality that is often 180 degrees away from the truth. But none of these books have been better-written than Ms. MacDonald's, which covers precisely these topics. She has a superb sense of the dramatic and the ironic and is not afraid to mete out criticism where it is warranted.

The only thing missing in this book, which I would like to have seen in it, is an in-depth analysis of the motivation of the sort of people the author depicts. Ms. MacDonald has shown us WHAT they've said and done, but we also need to know WHY. However, the WHO can tell us the why. The crackpot theories and identity politics she exposes are the exclusive property of politicians, sheltered academics, cloistered and muddle-headed bureaucrats, and professional "community activists" whose thinking is far-removed from the workaday world and the people who inhabit it. It's no accident that working-class people do not go along with these inanities, while so many upper-middle-class people do. In her Introduction, Ms. MacDonald offers an explanation for this. This cluster of trendy ideologies "assures its adherents that they are compassionate and caring, merely by virtue of subscribing to it. It gives them a sense of specialness." In other words, this set of ideological beliefs acts as medicine, which explains why its followers cling to it despite its consistent counter-productive results. Instead of relieving pain, it relieves the discomfort of upper-middle-class guilt.

Amazon.com carries a book that explores this exact topic-the relationship between such class-guilt and political ideologies. Its title is GUILT, BLAME, AND POLITICS, and it's well worth reading. Dr. Thomas Sowells's THE VISION OF THE ANOINTED, also carried by Amazon, makes some very similar points.

But don't be dissuaded by Ms. MacDonald's neglecting to include psychological factors. Her wonderful book succeeds in doing exactly what it set out to do: clearly and even entertainingly demonstrating the real cost of bad ideas and fuzzy-minded bureaucratic social engineering. It's ironic that such ideas have been flourishing even after the collapse of Marxism, the ultimate nonsensical bad idea; but we must remember that practical results don't matter at all to people who embrace ideologies designed to make them feel better. These ideologies still do that, whatever their other results; so as far as their adherents are concerned, the ideologies have succeeded! Read THE BURDEN OF BAD IDEAS and you'll see that in the ways that really matter, these dogmas have utterly failed.