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The Battleground of the Curriculum - Liberal Education and American Experience (Paperback, New Ed)
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The Battleground of the Curriculum - Liberal Education and American Experience (Paperback, New Ed)
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"The crisis of liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the
peaks of learning ... an intellectual crisis of the first
magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization". These
doomsday words of Allan Bloom in the best-selling The Closing of
the American Mind (1987) are among the latest and most politically
inflammatory manifestations of a "crisis" that this book
demonstrates has been going on for two centuries. In contrast to
the heated polemics and hyperbole of current debates concerning the
role of higher education in the United States, this eloquent,
balanced, and witty book seeks to bring sense to a volatile subject
by reminding us that controversy has always surrounded the
curriculum of the modern university. It points out where and how
contemporary critics of the curriculum are wrong, historically
speaking, and it shows how American ideals of "liberal education"
are extraordinarily obscure, the product of many different
attitudes and historical intentions. The author suggests that we
cannot begin to understand or even think clearly about the present
curricular wars without looking back over the past two centuries.
From the tangled web of history, he has selected certain threads in
the course of liberal education not only to illustrate the past but
to gain a sense of what might lie ahead. The moments in history the
author analyzes range from the "battle of the books" between Oxford
and representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment at the turn of
the nineteenth century, to the struggle over "Western Culture" at
Stanford that caught the attention of the politically ambitious and
of the nation as well. An exemplary figure within the debates over
liberal education isshown to be Charles W. Eliot, President of
Harvard University from 1869 to 1909. Eliot fought a relentless,
controversial, and temporarily successful battle to break down the
prescribed curriculum and to install the free elective system, in
which students were able to set their own program almost at will.
Indeed, "multiculturalism", with its pluralistic values, recreates
the conditions of his free curriculum. Among the other topics
considered are the nineteenth-century debate over religious and
secular learning, the origins and inherent contradictions of
courses in "civics" and Western civilization and programs in the
"great books". Ultimately, the author shows where we really are,
intellectually speaking, at the present moment in liberal
education: namely, at a juncture where the welds of literature and
history (which combined forces to achieve a position of commanding
strength) have been joined by, and in a measure challenged by, the
comparatively young discipline of anthropology, a moment when
American higher education needs to understand better what it is
really trying to do.
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