More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think Theyre Right by Laura Penny

More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, and Idiots Think Theyre Right Reviews

• 
  Piss lizard boi

  Facts . schools do succck and i odn;t like them
• 
  Stewart

  Laura Penny's diatribe against some of the idiotic attitudes that dominate American culture is well-writen and fun to read. And she, being Canadian, doesn't let her country off the hook for some of the same lame-brained attitudes and behaviors. Penny rails against America's longstanding anti-intellectualism (quoting Richard Hofstader's 1963 masterpiece "Anti-intellectualism in American life"), free-market fundamentalism and the worship of money ("The irony is that our overwhelming emphasis on money, our conviction that markets are the smartest systems of all, has resulted in three recessions and one global market meltdown in the past thirty years."), and the devastation of the public sphere by the private sector ("North American politics has become resolutely anti-public, driven as it is by two private engines: personal values and private wealth.").
  Penny, an English professor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has little good to say about what has happened to primary and secondary schools -- and universities and their humanities departments in both countries. She says that market/money attitudes now are the only motivation for most college students: "the piece of paper matters more than the learning that piece of paper is supposed to represent." She calls herself, an English professor, someone who must battle credentialism and students who don't want to learn. "I am the students' employee -- a grammar janitor, a language waitress. Good service means A's. Bad grades are bad service..."
  Most of the issues Penny discusses have been written about in other books, but she brings a refreshing fiery prose to her attacks -- and a chuckle as we descend into a second Dark Ages.
  
• 
  Aaron Miller

  I cannot fathom how Ms. Penny has such a paltry following on this site of supposed readers. Perhaps it has to do with here incisive intellectual wit and avoidance of monoslyabic terminology.
  
  I patiently await her next insightful ranting. May it happen soon!
• 
  Scott Holstad

  Basically hits the nail on the head. Recommended.
• 
  Andrew

  Efforts to paint Ignatieff as a tourist, a mere visitor in his own land, play on the idea that intellectuals are always foreigners, outsiders from some theoretical fairyland. We see an even more extreme version of this notion in the Birther conspiracies that allege Obama was not born in America.
  
  The small-town values message—on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel—is clear. Real patriots stay wherever Jesus and their mama’s cooter drop ‘em.
  
  
  ***
  
  
  Laura Penny’s second book is a sometimes scathing, often hilarious, and all-too sobering condemnation of the war our society is currently waging against intellectuals—the unknown quantities with breadth to their vocabularies and ambition for change. Targeting the public, private and post-secondary educational systems, as well as the continued perversion of media and the political process, Penny takes aim at the myths employed by the hard right to instil fear and uncertainty in the hearts of the common man. The goal? To train the gullible that someone with a degree to their name and a multi-syllabic approach to communication is not one of them and never will be. They are a threat, left-wing insurgents dedicated to wrestling away all control of life and livelihood for the average man, woman, and 2.5 children per household.
  
  None of this is particularly new—the divide between the left and the right, especially in the American two-party system (because you’re either with us, or your against us!), has been growing to near satirical proportions since Bush Junior’s back-to-back elections and subsequent layers of dumb fuckery. The middle ground in North America has vanished like freshman’s bathing habits. The result of these growing extremes is a volatility that can no longer be contained. With so much vitriol spewing forth without the filter of journalistic integrity, our conversations slip into nonsensical extremes, which we have little hope of reigning in. One only has to look to the still-bleating lips of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump to understand that what people want is not intelligence, but simple, basic commonality. And if they can’t get it on a financial level, they’ll take it through the rote transference of hate-filled ideas that even the most uneducated mind can grasp: “That black guy in Washington's saying something I don’t understand, so it must be bad.”
  
  What Penny does so effectively is to boil the multi-tentacled, stream-of-consciousness vulgarity employed by the loudest mouthpieces of the right to their core arguments. What’s most disturbing is that, more often than not, it comes down to what has been previously mentioned: fear of the unknown, fear of stepping beyond ones borders to see the world as a whole, and fear of anything approaching that most frightening of words—change.
  
  Penny’s writing is vicious. She employs nerd rage with educated restraint, never letting her cynicism or sarcasm overwhelm the studied voice of opposition she presents. Her arguments are definitely biased towards the values of the left, but her methods of attack finds a broader and more prescient footing when they include the occasionally ridiculous need that the left has to swing the pendulum in the other direction, reacting to the spiteful frustrations exhibited by the right with as much grandeur and camera mugging as possible. Case in point: chart the emotional ranges of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann and see if it’s even possible to find a shred of middle ground between them. Restraint might as well be a four-letter word…
  
  More Money than Brains isn’t a book for someone looking to be swayed one way or the other. It’s a right-brained, left-focussed love letter to the benefits and possibilities of education and the arts, and a call for some sense of humility to return to the political and social media spectrums. Penny has written a down-to-earth call to arms for the return of common sense and cultural diversity to public forums that also happens to be equal parts depressing and hysterical.
• 
  Melissa

  This book is like a Rick Mercer rant on steroids. Although there were many parts throughout the book that I really enjoyed, Laura Penny clearly has an inferiority complex.
  
• 
  D.A. Brown

  I have three university-aged children and an ex-husband who teaches at a university. My youngest son is starting at a liberal arts college this fall, and when I saw the subject of this book, I had to pick it up. I took a "practical" first degree myself, and have all my life wished I was more educated, rather than trained.
  Penny's discussion of the dumbing down of academia and the rejection of intelligence reads so true as I hear it from my kids - the total focus on jobs as vs. learning how to think, the disrespect for knowledge. Penny rants merrily onwards, leaving me snorting out loud as I read it in public, encouraging me to drop everything else and read more. Her style is breezy, cheeky, snarky and often filled with four-letter words. It makes me desperate to audit one of her classes. I think she'd be a hoot. She makes her case well, supports it with information, but never lets that make the reading dull or tedious. I like the way she takes both the Americans and we Canadians to task - suffering as we are under a government that thinks not answering questions is the way to run an election (and finding out to my horror that they are probably right), I mourn the loss of intelligent debate.
  This book is a must read for anyone with kids going to college, teachers, policy wonks, well, just everybody. Settle in somewhere where your laughter won't bother the inhabitants, and get ready for a wild, fun, and informative ride.
• 
  Rob Richards

  In this reviews totally not humble opinion, Laura Penny's hilarious take on the avarice and anti-intellectualism running rampant in our society is destined to become a classic. Dr. Penny does not simply skewer our poor school systems and fixation on wealth and fame, she impales it with extreme prejudice.
  
  As sociopolitical/economic analysis, More Money than Brains leaves no stone unturned and no finger un-pointed (though depending on the finger she sometimes points it straight up). Dr. Penny suggests that we are all to blame for the idiocracy we find ourselves in and responsible for getting out of it.
  
  Highly recommended. Unless you have no sense of humour or can't spell your own name, in which case pass on it.
• 
  Antonia

  A informative book for anyone undergoing or about to undergo secondary education. Penny's book reminds me of a chapter in Jane Jacobs' book "Dark Age Ahead" called "Credentialing vesus Educating" in which secondary education is geared towards obtaining those prestigious acronyms following your name rather than actually learning something. I am not convinced that there really is a “bullies vs nerd" war. It seems that the two high school foes have grown up to become workplace allies (e.g. the nerds invent it, the bullies lobby and market it). Penny is an English professor at Mount Saint Vincent University. She does make a strong argument for the arts and humanities - an underfunded program in Universities.
• 
  Mary Lou

  The sub-title, Why School Sucks, College is Crap, and Idiots Think They’re Right, more or less sums up both the content and the style. In a style that combines scholarly writing with profanity and new-speak, Penny makes a number of points about how our society has its values skewed. While we say we value education, we’re really anti-intellectual and value only what makes money. She makes a good case for the value of a liberal arts education. However, given her likely readership, I fear she’s preaching to the choir, and some of the choir is likely to take offense at some elements of her style.
  
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  Matt

  Laura Penny is sure fired up. The English prof makes some very compelling arguments about the value of an education in the humanities, but her vitriol sometimes becomes a tad overbearing. She is right to decry the idiocy displayed by the wingnuts on the fringe of the far-right but it does wear a little thin by the end of this short book. She holds nothing back when attacking the tea-bagging, money-minded, Dubya (or Harper)-backing brigade but is conspicuously silent when it comes to the extremists on her own end of the political spectrum. I suppose a little more balance would be nice, but this isn't that sort of book.
• 
  Jenn

  I really enjoyed reading about the Canadian side of the Idiocracy. It's easy for us to look down on the US (and about 2/3 of the examples are from the US), but we have our own problems with anti-intellectualism here too. I picked up the book thinking it would just re-hash arguments that are all over the internet, but she made some points and had some info I hadn't heard before. I really enjoyed her writing style as well.
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  Kathleen McRae

  This book was written with passion and was a pretty accurate description of North America in the past few years. It was funny at times and hard hitting...no soft landings in this book.I also agreed with her assessment of intellectualism and our educational institutes. Good read!
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  Leslie

  The ideas are fun, though not original to Penny, but the archly ironic slang and facetiousness got to me. Since her topic involves the importance of thinking well and not dumbing down ideas, all the jokey, self-consciously facetious language feels condescending.
• 
  Lindsay Nichols

  Interesting theories on defending the liberal arts education.
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  Jackie

  a wonderful, snarky defense of the humanities against the money-minded who think the only thing worth learning is how to make (or steal) a buck.
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  Jason

  Can't wait to not read this! Can't wait to read this!