Download or read book The Voice of Liberal Learning written by Michael Oakeshott and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To those weary and wary of the cacophony about what's wrong with education in America and what ought to be done about it, Oakeshott's voice beckons. As usual, his approach to the subject is subtle, comprehensive, and radical -- in the sense of summoning readers to the root of the matter. That root, Oakeshott believed, is the very nature of learning itself and, concomitantly, the means (as distinct from the method) by which the life of learning is discovered, cultivated, and pursued. As Oakeshott has written, "This, then, is what we are concerned with: adventures in human self-understanding. Not the bare protestation that a human being is a self-conscious, reflective intelligence and that he does not live by bread alone, but the actual enquiries, utterances, and actions in which human beings have expressed their understanding of the human condition. This is the stuff of what has come to be called a liberal' education -- liberal' because it is liberated from the distracting business of satisfying contingent wants." Includes a foreword by Timothy Fuller that reiterates the timelessness of Oakeshott's reflections amid the continuing clamour that characterises discourse about liberal education.
Download or read book In Defense of a Liberal Education written by Fareed Zakaria and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.
Download or read book Beyond the University written by Michael S. Roth and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contentious debates over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a student’s capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education. Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history: W. E. B. DuBois’s humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s educational utilitarianism, for example. Jane Addams’s emphasis on the cultivation of empathy and John Dewey’s calls for education as civic engagement were rejected as impractical by those who aimed to train students for particular economic tasks. Roth explores these arguments (and more), considers the state of higher education today, and concludes with a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.
Download or read book Experience and its Modes written by Michael Oakeshott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is Michael Oakeshott's discussion of the relationships between the most important perspectives from which we experience the world.
Download or read book Liberal Learning and the Art of Self Governance written by Emily Chamlee-Wright and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concerns over affordability and accountability have tended to direct focus away from the central aims of liberal learning, such as preparing minds for free inquiry and inculcating the habits of mind, practical skills, and values necessary for effective participation in civil society. The contributors to this volume seek to understand better what it is that can be done on a day-to-day basis within institutions of liberal learning that shape the habits and practices of civil society. The central argument of this volume is that institutions of liberal learning are critical to a developing and flourishing civil society. It is within these "civil society incubators" that the habits of open discourse are practiced and honed; that a collaborative (often contentious) commitment to truth seeking serves as the rules that govern our work together; that the rules of personal and widespread social cooperation are established, practiced, and refined. Many have made this argument as it relates to community based learning, and we explore that theme here as well. But acquiring and practicing the habits of civil society recur within and throughout the college context—in the classrooms, in college governance structures, in professional associations, in collaborative research, in the residence halls, and on the playing field. To put it another way, when they are at their best, institutions of liberal learning are contexts in which students learn how to live in a free society and learn the art of self-governance.
Download or read book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs written by Richard A. Detweiler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education: how and why it has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment. In ongoing debates over the value of a college education, the role of the liberal arts in higher education has been blamed by some for making college expensive, impractical, and even worthless. Defenders argue that liberal arts education makes society innovative, creative, and civic-minded. But these qualities are hard to quantify, and many critics of higher education call for courses of study to be strictly job-specific. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Detweiler, drawing on interviews with more than 1,000 college graduates aged 25 to 65, offers empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education. Detweiler finds that a liberal arts education has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment over a lifetime. Unlike other defenders of a liberal arts education, Detweiler doesn’t rely on philosophical arguments or anecdotes but on data. He developed a series of interview questions related to the content attributes of liberal arts (for example, course assignments and majors), the context attributes (out-of-class interaction with faculty and students, teaching methods, campus life), and the purpose attributes (adult life outcomes). Interview responses show that although both the content of study and the educational context are associated with significant life outcomes, the content of study has less relationship to positive adult life outcomes than the educational context. The implications of this research, Detweiler points out, range from the advantages of broadening areas of study to factors that could influence students’ decisions to attend certain colleges.
Download or read book Let s Be Reasonable written by Jonathan Marks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A conservative college professor's compelling defense of liberal education Not so long ago, conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. believed universities were worth fighting for. Today, conservatives seem more inclined to burn them down. In Let's Be Reasonable, conservative political theorist and professor Jonathan Marks finds in liberal education an antidote to this despair, arguing that the true purpose of college is to encourage people to be reasonable—and revealing why the health of our democracy is at stake. Drawing on the ideas of John Locke and other thinkers, Marks presents the case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on higher education. He recognizes that professors and administrators frequently adopt the language and priorities of the left, but he explains why conservative nightmare visions of liberal persecution and indoctrination bear little resemblance to what actually goes on in college classrooms. Marks examines why advocates for liberal education struggle to offer a coherent defense of themselves against their conservative critics, and demonstrates why such a defense must rest on the cultivation of reason and of pride in being reasonable. More than just a campus battlefield guide, Let's Be Reasonable recovers what is truly liberal about liberal education—the ability to reason for oneself and with others—and shows why the liberally educated person considers reason to be more than just a tool for scoring political points.
Download or read book Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty First Century written by Robert E. Luckett Jr. and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-05-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by William D. Adams, Sarah Archino, Mario J. Azevedo, Katrina Byrd, Rico D. Chapman, Helen O. Chukwuma, Monica Flippin Wynn, Tatiana Glushko, Eric J. Griffin, Kathi R. Griffin, Yumi Park Huntington, Thomas M. Kersen, Robert E. Luckett Jr., Floyd W. Martin, Preselfannie W. McDaniels, Dawn Bishop McLin, Lauren Ashlee Messina, Byron D'Andra Orey, Kathy Root Pitts, Candis Pizzetta, Lawrence Sledge, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, Joseph Martin Stevenson, Seretha D. Williams, and Karen C. Wilson-Stevenson Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century delves into the essential nature of the liberal arts in America today. During a time when the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math dominate the narrative around the future of higher education, the liberal arts remain vital but frequently dismissed academic pursuits. While STEAM has emerged as a popular acronym, the arts get added to the discussion in a way that is often rhetorical at best. Written by scholars from a diversity of fields and institutions, the essays in this collection legitimize the liberal arts and offer visions for the role of these disciplines in the modern world. From the arts, pedagogy, and writing to social justice, the digital humanities, and the African American experience, the essays that comprise Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century bring attention to the vast array of ways in which the liberal arts continue to be fundamental parts of any education. In an increasingly transactional environment, in which students believe a degree must lead to a specific job and set income, colleges and universities should take heed of the advice from these scholars. The liberal arts do not lend themselves to the capacity to do a single job, but to do any job. The effective teaching of critical and analytical thinking, writing, and speaking creates educated citizens. In a divisive twenty-first-century world, such a citizenry holds the tools to maintain a free society, redefining the liberal arts in a manner that may be key to the American republic.
Download or read book A Liberal Education in Late Emerson written by Sean Ross Meehan and published by Camden House (NY). This book was released on 2019 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sean Meehan's book reclaims three important but critically neglected aspects of the late Emerson's "mind": first, his engagement with rhetoric, conceived as the organizing power of mind and, unconventionally, characterized by the trope "metonymy"; second, his public engagement with the ideals of liberal education and debates in higher education reform early in the period (1860-1910) that saw the emergence of the modern university; and third, his intellectual relation to significant figures from this age of educational transformation: Walt Whitman, William James, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard's first African American PhD. Meehan argues that the late Emerson educates through the "rhetorical liberal arts," and he thereby rethinks Emerson's influence as rhetorical lessons in the traditional pedagogy and classical curriculum of the liberal arts college.
Download or read book College written by Andrew Delbanco and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strengths and failures of the American college, and why liberal education still matters As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise. In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.
Download or read book The Art of Learning written by Josh Waitzkin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-27 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eight-time national chess champion and world champion martial artist shares the lessons he has learned from two very different competitive arenas, identifying key principles about learning and performance that readers can apply to their life goals. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.
Download or read book Observations Upon Liberal Education written by George Turnbull and published by Natural Law and Enlightenment. This book was released on 2003 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Observations upon Liberal Education, the first modern edition, arose from a longing for a liberty of mind and tried to lay the groundwork for a society of free, virtuous, and educated citizens. The work's influence was by no means confined to Scotland. Benjamin Franklin drew generously from the work of Turnbull. The Liberty Fund edition of Observations upon Liberal Education is the first modern edition of this work ever published.
Download or read book Education and Conversation written by David Bakhurst and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Michael Oakeshott spoke of education as initiation into 'the conversation of mankind' more than fifty years ago, the idea has inspired a diverse array of thinkers and continues to be invoked today by those seeking to resist the influence of managerialism and narrow instrumentalism in educational policy and practice. Education and Conversation draws together papers written by scholars from both the analytic and continental philosophical traditions to offer a variety of perspectives on the implications of Oakeshott's educational ideas. The metaphor of the conversation of mankind is explored, together with the roots of Oakeshott's thinking in his early philosophical work, the relevance of his ideas to the concept of Bildung, and the significance of his political conservatism in evaluating the seemingly progressive potential of his educational ideas. In addition, concepts prominent in Oakeshott's thought are taken up and brought to bear on contemporary philosophical discussions about education, learning and development, including the nature of initiation, the phenomenology of listening, and the value of the liberal arts tradition. Education and Conversation shows how the idea of conversation illuminates both the character and the ends of education, yielding insight into the scope and limits of the philosophy of education and the character of philosophical inquiry more generally.
Download or read book How the Liberal Arts Can Save Liberal Democracy written by Steven M. DeLue and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Currently, liberal democracy is threatened by authoritarian movements, not just in the United States but also in societies around the world. The liberal arts helps to arrest these tendencies because of the support by citizens in liberal democracies for the values the latter shares with the liberal arts: autonomy and freedom. Autonomy is the capacity to make reasoned decisions about a host of political, social, and personal matters—independent of external parties who seek to control our lives for the sake of their ends and at the cost of our freedom. But autonomy depends on people being able to enter into discussions—what I call discourses of mutual respect—designed to test ideas in public against facts and good reasons. This discourse is facilitated by an enlarged culture through which individuals identify what they hold in common and by which individuals work to understand their differences. Now, authoritarian regimes reject autonomy because it empowers citizens to designate the boundaries and content of political authority. Liberal democracies, in contrast, embrace autonomy because it is the basis for the political institutions that provide civic equality—and through it—the freedom of citizens to control their destiny. Yet, ironically, an enlarged culture and the discourse of mutual respect that, together, sustain autonomy are not likely to be produced within a highly partisan political atmosphere of a liberal democracy. Still, a liberal democracy is open to the importation of these elements from the liberal arts. Thus, saving liberal democracy from authoritarianism depends on a robust liberal arts presence in society. What reforms of the liberal arts are needed to make this objective possible? Much rides on the answer to this question. For the fact is that if the liberal arts recedes to a whisper, liberal democracy is likely to be defeated by the authoritarian’s bluster-filled and always nihilist roar.
Download or read book Rescuing Socrates written by Roosevelt Montas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.
Download or read book The Post Pandemic Liberal Arts College written by Steve Volk and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A succinct and impassioned call to reimagine the small liberal arts college, by two veteran educators. Private liberal arts colleges have struggled for decades; now, as the COVID-19 pandemic widens cracks latent in many American
Download or read book Religion Politics and the Moral Life written by Michael Oakeshott and published by . This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Oakeshott's interest in religion and theology was especially prominent in his essays of the 1920s and 1930s. This book consists of four important unpublished pieces, together with six essays by Oakeshott that originally appeared in remote and inaccessible journals. Much of the collection was written early in his career and reveals not only Oakeshott's initial intellectual preoccupations but the idiosyncratic nature of his religious outlook and the moral convictions that governed his own life. The opening essay, "Religion and the World," which dates from 1925, reflects his view of what it means to live "religiously" in the world and prefigures arguments later elaborated in Experience and Its Modes. All the essays probe the meaning of words commonly--but often inappropriately--used in the discussion of political life. Thus Oakeshott explores meanings of religion and worldliness, society and sociality, authority and the state, political activity, and the character of political ideas and political philosophy. His writing is persuasive and compelling, and the essays are distinguished by great clarity and a genuinely philosophic spirit. In a substantial introduction, Timothy Fuller provides the first full explanation of Oakeshott's religious ideas, setting them within their philosophical and political contexts. He shows how, over a thirty-year period, Oakeshott elaborated the implications of Experience and Its Modes, worked out his political theory as summarized in Rationalism in Politics, and gradually assembled his own philosophical account of the ideal that European civilization had made concrete in history--civil association under the rule of law--and to which he gave definitive expression in On Human Contact. Timothy Fuller is Dean of the College, Colorado College, and editor of The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education.
