Reclaiming the Core: Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)
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This class aims to understand liberal education-the ancient idea that learning is valuable for its own sakeand its relation to the human capacity to live freely. Can the pursuit of the truth make us better citizens, improve our character, or perhaps even save our souls? Or does civic piety only trap us deeper in the Cave? For students of both the liberal arts and politics, these questions are existential. Once liberal education was thought the characteristic marker of the leisured, ruling class, making it aristocratic, not democratic. To better understand whether liberal education offers something that contemporary America needs, this class traces its history: developing from Plato and Aristotle to the medieval university and the Renaissance humanists, it undergoes a profound critique in the early modern period and finds an uneasy home in the modern Western research university. While this model has come under repeated attack, it remains prestigious and envied across the world. Along the way, we will ask whether the university is necessarily secular or religious and consider Notre Dame's Catholic mission. In the context of today's opposition between populists and elitists, can elite graduates serve the common good?
Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education
I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3 Even a half-century ago, the question of life's meaning had a more central and respected place in higher education than it does today. But the questions of how to spend one's life, of what to care about and why, the question of which commitments, relations, projects, and pleasures are capable of giving a life purpose and value: regardless of the name it was given, and even if, as was often the case, it was given no name at all, this question was taken more seriously by more of our colleges 2 Anthony T. Kronman, Education's End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 2-3, 9, 10-11, 35, and 39. Many of Kronman's criticisms were laid out more extensively in Eva T. H. Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 23-30. 3 Kronman, Education's End, 40. 4 Ibid., 41.
Though formally released in September 2006, the greater part of the research that informed the report that follows was carried out by my co-authors Daniel Laurison and Jonathan VanAntwerpen and me in the fall of 2005. The report describes an exciting movement that at once fosters debate within academia over how best to instill life-long habits of civic engagement among college students, while developing and teaching new curriculum and classes that serve that goal. The movement was encountering several obstacles to its growth and influence, some of which, such as the epistemology of specialization and expertise that has come to dominate American higher education and the promotion and tenure standards that sustain it, constitute formidable challenges to the very idea of education for democratic citizenship.
Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education , 2021
Although the United States is often heralded as the leader in the liberal arts and sciences model of higher education, the idea of a "liberal education" itself remains both loaded and vague. Do we yet have a consensus on its meaning and application today that does not rely on some appeal to a vaguely defined and putatively historic tradition? In this article, we sketch out the problem and trace its historic origins in the United States to better address one of the enduring and valuable meanings of a US liberal higher education. Our purpose is to illuminate the essential holistic and student-centered dimension of US small liberal arts college (SLAC) education, and why it is worth preserving through the current crises and pandemic. We draw from this dimension of the US liberal education tradition several helpful suggestions about how to escape our confusion surrounding the meaning of the idea: focusing on the character formation of individuals that can serve their communities, shifting curriculum away from mere breadth and depth in disciplinary knowledge and to breadth and depth of character development, supporting teacher tracks in higher education to foster this kind of student-centered learning, exploring the possibilities for liberal holistic learning in other contexts and at distance, and finally being unafraid to defend a robust holistic liberal education even if it demands a lot to carry out well.
Philosophy, Politics, and the End of Liberal Arts Education
This is an essay written for general Christian audiences in which I respond to politicians who have argued that study in philosophy and the liberal arts lacks economic and social value. Against such views, I argue that careful study of the liberal arts in general and philosophy in particular is crucial for developing the kind of wisdom and clear moral vision that is necessary for good leadership in the church and in all facets of today's complex world.