Word: silbering
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...teaching profession gets generally low marks in Silber's book. He lambastes U.S. schools of education as an "unintentional conspiracy to defraud the American public because they are certifying the ineducable to be educators." To draw a better pool of prospective teachers, he suggests scrapping the current time-consuming four-year certification program in favor of rigorous qualification tests and one semester of pedagogy and practice teaching. In another controversial view, he believes that high school teachers should score an A on a freshman-level college exam in their subject before being allowed to teach...
...Silber feels that many students have it too easy these days, paraphrasing the Roman poet Juvenal in observing that "luxury is more ruthless than war." He chafes at hearing undergraduates speak of entering the "real world" once they leave school. "That is an expression of escapism," he writes. "It suggests that they were avoiding the real world all the time they were in school." He also argues that college freshmen, rather than graduate students, warrant special attention: "If more of our academic resources were spent on freshmen and sophomores, advanced undergraduates and graduate students would be far more able...
...Silber's outspokenness is not limited to educational matters. Whether writing or speaking, he characteristically offers opinions on everything from Nicaragua (pro-contra) and Gorbachev (don't trust him) to abortion (pro-life) and Jesse Jackson (full of "mindless, rhyming pieces of nonsense on which he has built a career"). One of his central philosophical tenets is the necessity of accepting hardship and disappointment. "I'm sorry I didn't put 'death' into the index," he said in an interview. "I really believe that confrontation with death and with reality is necessary to moral education...
Confrontation and struggle have marked much of Silber's career. "Everything is combat to him," says one B.U. professor. Born in San Antonio, Silber grew up in the hardscrabble Depression years. His mother helped support the family as a schoolteacher while his father, a German architect, tried to make ends meet. Silber started life with a deformed right arm, and his efforts to overcome that handicap probably contributed to his combativeness. After graduate forays into law and religion -- he once studied for the ministry -- Silber received a doctorate in philosophy from Yale and went on to teach at the University...
Despite his often abrasive words, Silber can be charming in person -- as long as he is unchallenged. Interviewers confront seamless arguments peppered with quotes from Shakespeare and references to his critics as "pismires," creatures defined in the dictionary as ants. A small-framed, brown-haired man with angular features and hard eyes, the pipe-smoking Silber smiles rarely, swears sporadically and goes stone-faced when angered. Little of what he says, he concedes, is spontaneous. "I've spent more time thinking about most of the issues I talk about than ((other)) people who talk about them. And as a consequence...