The Politics of Liberal Education

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Darryl Gless, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Darryl Gless, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780822311997, 9780822311836
• eBook ISBN: 9780822381747
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Controversy over what role "the great books" should play in college curricula and questions about who defines "the literary canon" are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation's increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Within this area of consensus, however, the contributors display a wide range of approaches, illuminating the issues from the perspectives of their particular disciplines—classics, education, English, history, and philosophy, among others—and their individual experiences as teachers. Among the topics they discuss are canon-formation in the ancient world, the idea of a "common culture," and the educational implications of such social movements as feminism, technological changes including computers and television, and intellectual developments such as "theory." Readers interested in the controversies over American education will find this volume an informed alternative to sensationalized treatments of these issues.

Contributors. Stanley Fish, Phyllis Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Henry A. Giroux, Darryl J. Gless, Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, George A. Kennedy, Bruce Kuklick, Richard A. Lanham, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Alexander Nehamas, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Public, the Press, and the Professors
• Humanities for the Future: Reflections on the Western Culture Debate at Stanford
• The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum
• Teach the Conflicts
• Cult-Lit: Hirsch, Literacy, and the “National Culture”
• The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition
• Liberal Arts Education and the Struggle for Public Life: Dreaming about Democracy
• Pedagogy i.n the Context of an Antihomophobic Project
• Serious Watching
• From Ivory Tower to Tower of Babel?
• The Emergence of the Humanities
• The Academy and the Public
• Classics and Canons
• Two Cheers for the Cultural Left
• The Common Touch, or, One Size Fits All
• Against Nostalgia: Reflections on Our Present Discontents in American Higher Education
• Notes on Contributors
• Index