Liberal Education

Liberal education has always had its share of theorists, believers, and detractors, both inside and outside the academy. The best of these have been responsible for the development of the concept, and of its changing tradition. Drawn from a symposium jointly sponsored by the Educational Leadership program and the American Council of Learned Societies, this work looks at the requirements of liberal education for the next century and the strategies for getting there. With contributions from Leon Botstein, Ernest Boyer, Howard Gardner, Stanley Katz, Bruce Kimball, Peter Lyman, Susan Resneck Pierce, Adam Yarmolinsky and Frank Wong, Rethinking Liberal Education proposes better ways of connecting the curriculum and organization of liberal arts colleges with today's challenging economic and social realities. The authors push for greater flexibility in the organizational structure of academic departments, and argue that faculty should play a greater role in the hard discussions that shape their institutions. Through the implementation of interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to learning, along with better integration of the curriculum with the professional and vocational aspects of the institution, this work proposes to restore vitality to the curriculum. The concept of rethinking liberal education does not mean the same thing to every educator. To one, it may mean a strategic shift in requirements, to another the reformulation of the underlying philosophy to meet changing times. Any significant reform in education needs careful thought and discussion. Rethinking Liberal Education makes a substantial contribution to such debates. It will be of interest to scholars and students, administrators, and anyone concerned with the issues of modern education.

What should the aims of education be in a liberal society and who should exercise control over education? How can children be taught to become good citizens of a pluralistic state? The Demands of Liberal Education seeks to answer these questions by drawing upon political theory, philosophy of education, and empirical research to develop a liberal theory of children's education that is provocative and new. The book argues that contrary to the assumptions of many philosophers, educators, parents and politicians, the liberal state is obligated as a matter of justice to help all children develop the capacity for autonomy. Levinson argues that liberal governments should exercise much greater control over schools than they now do.

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Philosopher and classicist Martha C. Nussbaum takes up the challenge of conservative critics of academe to argue persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education.

"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 ele

Education shapes character, particularly through the liberal arts. This collection of essays explores the importance of moral education to the liberal arts and discusses how moral education fosters character development. The contributors examine the meaning of moral education, the rationale for promoting ethical values in an academic environment, and the conditions under which morality can best be taught. Though the text addresses philosophical issues, the essays focus on how the liberal arts institution can implement moral education to fulfill its objectives.

R.V. Young examines the dominant trends in literary theory during the past thirty years, chronicling their effect on the teaching of literature and the imparting of a liberal education.