More Money Than Brains: Why School Sucks, College Is Crap, and Idiots Think They're Right

by Penny, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780771070488
• ISBN10: 0771070489
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-20
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart Ltd

Summary

One of Canada's funniest and most incisive social critics reveals why in North America, where governments spend so much on schools and colleges, training is valued far more than education and loud-mouth ignoramuses are widely and publicly celebrated. Public education in the United States is in such pitiful shape, the president wants to replace it. Test results from Canadian public schools indicate that Canadian students are at least better at taking tests than their American cousins. On both sides of the border, education is rapidly giving way to job training, and learning how to think for yourself and for the sake of dipping into the vast ocean of human knowledge is going distinctly out of fashion. It gets worse, says Laura Penny, university lecturer and scathingly funny writer. Paradoxically, in the two nations that have among the best universities, libraries, and research institutions in the world, intellectuals are largely distrusted and yelping ignoramuses now clog the arenas of public discourse. A brilliant defence of the humanities and social sciences,More Money Than Brainstakes a deadly and extremely funny aim at those who would dumb us down.

Author Biography

Author of the Canadian bestseller Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit (a Globe and Mail Best Book of the year), LAURA PENNY has a PhD in Comparative Literature, a MA in Theory and Criticism, and a BA in Contemporary Studies and English. She has worked as a bookstore clerk, a student activist, a union organizer, a university instructor, and her writing has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Saturday Night, and Toronto Life. She lives in Halifax, where she teaches at Mount Saint Vincent University.

Table of Contents

Don't Need No Edjumacation	p. 1
At the Arse End of the Late, Great Enlightenment	p. 36
Is Our Schools Sucking?	p. 61
Screw U or Hate My Professors	p. 100
Bully vs. Nerd: On the Persistence of Freedumb in Political Life	p. 132
More Is Less: The Media-Entertainment Perplex	p. 169
If You're So Smart, Why Ain't You Rich?	p. 205
Notes	p. 236
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