Why Education Is Useless Daniel Cottom "A tour de force, implicitly
summarizing and commenting on more than two millennia of arguments
about the function of education. "Why Education Is Useless" is
craftily written and thoroughly enjoyable."--Michael Berube, author
of "The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of
Literary Studies" Education is useless because it destroys our
common sense, because it isolates us from the rest of humanity,
because it hardens our hearts and swells our heads. Bookish persons
have long been subjects of suspicion and contempt and nowhere more
so, perhaps, than in the United States during the past twenty
years. Critics of education point to the Nazism of Martin
Heidegger, for example, to assert the inhumanity of highly learned
people; they contend that an oppressive form of identity politics
has taken over the academy and complain that the art world has been
overrun by culturally privileged elitists. There are always, it
seems, far more reasons to disparage the ivory tower than to honor
it. The uselessness of education, particularly in the humanities,
is a pervasive theme in Western cultural history. With wit and
precision, "Why Education Is Useless" engages those who attack
learning by focusing on topics such as the nature of humanity,
love, beauty, and identity as well as academic scandals, identity
politics, multiculturalism, and the corporatization of academe.
Asserting that hostility toward education cannot be dismissed as
the reaction of barbarians, fools, and nihilists, Daniel Cottom
brings a fresh perspective to all these topics while still making
the debates about them comprehensible to those who are not academic
insiders. A brilliant and provocative work of cultural argument and
analysis, "Why Education Is Useless" brings in materials from
literature, philosophy, art, film, and other fields and proceeds
from the assumption that hostility to education is an extremely
complex phenomenon, both historically and in contemporary American
life. According to Cottom, we must understand the perdurable appeal
of this antagonism if we are to have any chance of recognizing its
manifestations--and countering them. Ranging in reference from
Montaigne to George Bush, from Sappho to Timothy McVeigh, "Why
Education Is Useless" is a lively investigation of a notion that
has persisted from antiquity through the Renaissance and into the
modern era, when the debate over the relative advantages of a
liberal and a useful education first arose. Facing head on the
conception of utility articulated in the nineteenth century by John
Stuart Mill, and directly opposing the hostile conceptions of
inutility that have been popularized in recent decades by such
ideologues as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John Ellis, Cottom
contends that education must indeed be "useless" if it is to be
worthy of its name. Daniel Cottom is David A. Burr Chair of Letters
at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of numerous books,
including "Ravishing Tradition: Cultural Forces and Literary
History" and "Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment."
2003 256 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3720-7 Cloth $45.00s 29.50
ISBN 978-0-8122-0168-0 Ebook $45.00s 29.50 World Rights Education
Short copy: "A tour de force, implicitly summarizing and commenting
on more than two millennia of arguments about the function of
education."--Michael Berube, author of "The Employment of English:
Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies"
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