Education; Assumptions Versus History

In the papers collected in Education: Assumptions versus History, Thomas Sowell takes a hard look at the state of education in our schools and universities. His imperative is to test the assumptions underlying contemporary educational policies and innovations against the historical and contemporary evidence.

In a well-reasoned and engaging style, Sowell discusses the controversies over affirmative action, race and IQ, tuition tax credits and academic tenure. The experiences of blacks and other ethnic groups in the American educational system are examined closely to identify the factors and patterns behind both success and failure. In writing of the bitter controversy over black intelligence, he asks if there "was really anything to explain? Is there anything peculiar about either the level or the pattern of black IQs? " when compared to other groups. The author addresses university education in several essays, including one that uses the insights of Thorstein Veblen's classic 1918 work, Higher Education in America, to assess the condition of the modern university.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

He writes on economics, history, social policy, ethnicity, and the history of ideas. Sowell’s current research focuses on cultural history in a world perspective. Sowell's journalistic writings include a nationally syndicated column that appears in more than 150 newspapers from Boston to Honolulu.

Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University. He has also been associated with three other research centers, in addition to the Hoover Institution. He was project director at the Urban Institute, 1972-1974, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 1976–77, and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, 1975-76.