Josiah Bunting takes a unique approach to the problems of American education and society in general. A millionaire philanthropist has left funds for the creation of his "dream college".Concerned with the training of mind, body, and soul, this college has as its' main goal the creation of disinterested servants of the nation. I can't praise this book enough. As a teacher, I particularly liked the chapter entitled "Who Shall Lead Them"? The ideas about what defines effective teaching and engaged learning will inspire all teachers even if Generlal Bunting's college never becomes a reality.

Bunting uses the incredibly wonderful "letters" of a billionaire and the "writer" to outline a wonderful vision of what education could be. Because it's embedded in a story, Bunting is able to be much stronger than he might have been able to be in others forms.

This book is both challenging and great to read. I highly recommend it!

Josiah Bunting has written an incredibly thought provoking book on higher education. If you are a parent about to send your child to a Ivy League school, read this book...and weep. This is not the education that your child will receive.

The current Superintendant of Virginia Military Academy, a former headmaster of the one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country (Lawrenceville), has written a spectacular book. The book, though a novel, depicts so many interesting subjects. It depicts what life is like at a very high-powered northeast boarding school. It depicts what the college selection process has become. It depicts the kinds of ambitions that parents may have for their children, and how these reflect, so it appears, more the needs of the parent than the needs of the child. It depicts the impact of such pressures on children who are quite talented but perhaps not up to the full extent of their parents' demands. And it depicts the sad reality of marriages in which the more balanced parent is, for whatever reason, unwilling to demand that balance on the part of the parent whose values are confused. This book ought to be mandatory reading for any high school student in a high powered secondary school with self-demanding expectations and for both of his parents.

In All Loves Excelling, author Josiah Bunting draws upon his experiences as a former headmaster at the Lawrenceville School (near Princeton) to craft a sensitive and compelling story of Amanda, a young female student trying to handle the pressures that beset teenagers today including the fierce competition for admission to leading colleges, the expectations of ambitious parents, the self-promoting agendas of school officials, and the definitions of success prevalent in contemporary society. All Loves Excelling is a superbly crafted, original, and highly recommended novel.

This is an excellent morality tale about parents who push their children to succeed in order to feed their own ambitions. Mr. Bunting seems to share my disapproval of the post-graduate year, and for the same reason: a single year spent at a boarding school is insufficent to transform a callow youth into someone the school can be proud to call one of their own. The first year at a superior school is jarring indeed, but these schools eventually teach their charges to handle pressure with grace...to find the sweet spot, as it were.

As has been said before, the dark, dirty secret of New England (and mid-Atlantic) boarding schools is that their expertise lies in turning the mediocre sons and daughters of the rich into persons who can pass muster in any boardroom or ballroom. They do not exist to make brilliant students more so, or even to boost students' chances at gaining admission to popular colleges.

This is a fine book and I recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in boarding schools or the college admission tumult. Those with an interest in education simply must read Mr. Bunting's AN EDUCATION FOR OUR TIME -- it is an absolute delight. Mr. Bunting is also the author of THE LIONHEADS, a highly original, brisk, and informed novel of the war in Vietnam.

Unfortunately, this Yale edition leaves out about half of what Newman himself published in 1873 as the definitive edition of THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY. Published here are only the nine "Dublin Discourses" from Part I on "University Teaching" and but four of the ten chapters of Part II, "University Subjects Discussed in Occasional Lectures and Essays." For the hundred-page displacement of Newman's essays, the editor substitutes five interpretive essays supposedly inquiring into the relevance of Newman's book for today's higher education debates. These interpretive essays have major inconsistencies and repetitions among themselves and are of mixed quality, with inaccuracies and serious misunderstandings of some of Newman's central ideas. As accurate forays of the Newmanian mind into the twentieth- and twenty-first century university, only the engaging and intellectually challenging essays by George Marsden and George Landow succeed. (COMPLETE paperback editions of Newman's IDEA are available from Loyola University Press, 1987, and University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

A wonderful work, too bad that this edition by Regnery is chock full of glaring typographical errors. Detracts from Newman's otherwise brilliant prose.

Newman's work is not only an eloquent, erudite, and careful defense of the virtue of knowledge and the value of a liberal education; it is also a brilliantly reasoned and felt argument for the prevention of hubris on the part of any particular branch of knowledge.

Newman's sound warnings against the overreaching of scientific fields and the triumph of smug materialism and positivism are still urgent, of course. Newman is also careful to point out that the liberal arts and even theology may attempt to establish a single, inadequate framework for the discovery of truth.

Newman's complex epistemology does not fall prey to the heresy that truth is not one, but reminds us that in our present state, truth present various aspects and that the tyranny of any particular branch of knowledge is the victory of ignorance.