The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: neediest cases, revisionist lust, willful neglect, The Burden of Bad Ideas, New York, The Smithsonian Today (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Spirited, stimulating essays.... vivid and devastating…social, cultural and political criticism of the first order.

Review

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

A very good book. -- Wall Street Journal

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

Among discussions of urban malaise...this book has the freshness of a stiff, changing breeze. -- Allen D. Boyer, New York Times Book Review

An informative, provocative exploration…masterful…a startlingly valuable book. -- Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun

Brilliantly researched. -- Peter Savodnik, Weekly Standard

Heather Mac Donald is a brilliant journalist of the first rank. -- John Leo, U.S. News and World Report

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

Mac Donald is the indispensable journalist...if you question that characterization, you haven’t read her work. -- George Will

Provocative...even when you disagree with her you recognize that her viewpoint must be thoughtfully considered and countered. -- Richard Lamm, Wall Street Journal

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher (August 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566633370
• ISBN-13: 978-1566633376
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #339,435 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

40 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong Philosophical Analysis of Social Issues, July 27, 2001

By	Michael D. Mallinger (Woodbridge, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The Burden of Bad Ideas" is Heather Mac Donald's effort to apply classical liberal political philosophy to contemporary social issues. Like many scholars who apply liberalism to economic issues, she offers hard-hitting analysis of why many government programs intended to help the least fortunate members of society fail in the long run. As the title implies, she emphasizes the role social elites play in perpetuating these failures.

She begins by placing blame for the current state of social policy squarely on the shoulders of private charitable foundations. Foundations, she asserts, provide the bulk of the funding for community activists who stamp out traditional culture among the poor and replace it with multiculturalism and "enlightened sexuality." In addition, she raises the issue of donor intent with regard to foundation agendas. She uses the 1977 resignation of Henry Ford II from the board at the Ford Foundation as an extreme example of how far professional philanthropists are willing to diverge from the goals of their endowees. Most importantly, she highlights foundation support of "public interest litigation" as the largest loophole among current prohibitions against lobbying by tax-exempt organizations.

From there, she discusses specific social issues in which foundations have damaged the ideas of individual responsibility and accountability. Instead of attacking public education as an institution itself, she addresses its teaching philosophy, which she believes originated with William Heard Kilpatrick at the Teachers College of Columbia University. She asserts that Kilpatrick's efforts to encourage teachers to instill critical thinking skills at the expense of conveying actual knowledge led to the downfall of American education. As an example of the perverse effects of Kilpatrick's legacy, she discusses how the teaching of graffiti classes at a New York high school enables its teachers to avert their responsibility to enrich the academic and moral lives of their students. Thus, her critique has strong implications for educators at both public and private schools who buy into Kilpatrick's ideas.

However, Mac Donald is at her best when she addresses the revolution in political-correctness taking place at American law schools. She asserts that feminist and minority "deconstructionists" seek to dispose of the notion of reason in the law, which they view as promoting white and male supremacy. She explains that they seek to replace it with "life stories" intended to introduce female and minority viewpoints into the law. She believes this phenomenon is indicative of a more general tendency among law school professors to view themselves as interpreters of the law instead of teachers of legal doctrine. Although she claims that critical thinking should be a part of legal education, she concludes that "were the view that law is only the judge's politics ever to be widely held, citizens would have no reason to grant judges legitimacy, and the basis of the legal order would crumble."

Overall, Mac Donald's work goes above and beyond typical efforts to expose arbitrary authority among legislators and bureaucrats. Her willingness to delve into the philosophy underlying the ideas she opposes enhances her credibility as a whistleblower. Individuals who believe that efforts to reform social policy have succeeded due to the Clinton administration's decision to capitulate on a few key issues should take a careful look at this book.

61 of 73 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)

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.