Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

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  • Author: Justin Buckley Dyer
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780826222831
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civic, and professional growth. The current generation of technologies that mediate our formal and informal academic interchanges are crystalizing the echo-chamber allegiances that have developed on our politically charged campuses, frustrating the university's capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow's leaders. Moreover, as applications such as Teams and Zoom become ensconced within higher learning institutions, universities will inadvertently replicate the existing socioeconomic inequalities that are poisoning America's civic culture. With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collection of 18 original essays, editors Dyer and Vassiliou hope to deepen our understanding of underappreciated issues in the history of political thought. For the volume, the editors have recruited a remarkable and diverse group of scholars who draw from both their research expertise and personal experience as educators to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of the market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today. The contributing authors' competing perspectives provide innovative insights into how liberal arts universities might adapt to a post-COVID-19 academic environment by recalibrating their long-standing pedagogic aims of helping students formulate self-understanding and the meaning of thoughtful citizenship.


Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society

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  • Author: Justin Buckley Dyer
  • Publisher: University of Missouri Press
  • ISBN: 0826274889
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 462

The liberal arts university has been in decline since well before the virtualization of campus life, increasingly inviting public skepticism about its viability as an institution of personal, civic, and professional growth. New technologies that might have brought people together have instead frustrated the university’s capacity to foster thoughtful citizenship among tomorrow’s leaders and exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities that are poisoning America’s civic culture. With Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, a collection of 19 original essays, editors Justin Dyer and Constantine Vassiliou present the work of a diverse group of scholars to assess the value of a liberal arts education in the face of market, technological, cultural, and political forces shaping higher learning today.


In Defense of a Liberal Education

In Defense of a Liberal Education

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  • Author: Fareed Zakaria
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • ISBN: 0393247694
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 176

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.


The Demands of Liberal Education

The Demands of Liberal Education

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  • Author: Meira Levinson
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0198295448
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 250

The Demands of Liberal Education analyses and applies contemporary liberal political theory to certain key problems within the field of educational theory. Levinson examines problems centred around determining appropriate educational aims, content and institutional structure and argues that liberal governments should exercise a much greater control over education than they now do. Combining theoretical with empirical research, this book will interest and provoke scholars,policy makers, educators, parents, and all citizens interested in education politics.


Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education

Liberal Democracy and Liberal Education

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  • Author: Daniel E. Cullen
  • Publisher: Lexington Books
  • ISBN: 1498502474
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 190

This book reflects on the paradoxical relationship of liberal education and liberal democracy. Contributors are critical of the way higher education typically interprets its responsibility for educating citizens, and link failures to academia’s neglect of certain founding principles of the American political tradition and the liberal arts ideal.


Cultivating Humanity

Cultivating Humanity

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  • Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • ISBN: 0674735471
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 344

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such “citizens of the world” in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of “the new education” is rooted in Seneca’s ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found—in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male. Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship. For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.


Creating Citizens

Creating Citizens

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  • Author: Eamonn Callan
  • Publisher: Clarendon Press
  • ISBN: 0191521981
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 278

Any liberal democratic state must honour religious and cultural pluralism in its educational policies. To fail to honour them would betray ideals of freedom and toleration fundamental to liberal democracy. Yet if such ideals are to flourish from one generation to the next, allegiance to the distinctive values of liberal democracy is a necessary educational end, whose pursuit will constrain pluralism. The problem of political education is therefore to ensure the continuity across generations of the constitutive ideals of liberal democracy, while remaining hospitable to a diversity of conduct and belief that sometimes threatens those very ideals. Creating Citizens addresses this crucial problem. In lucid and elegant prose, Professor Callan, one of the world's foremost philosophers of education, identifies both the principal ends of civic education, and the rights that limit their political pursuit. This timely new study sheds light on some of the most divisive educational controversies, such as state sponsorship and regulation of denominational schooling, as well as the role of non-denominational schools in the moral and political development of children. Oxford Political Theory presents the best new work in contemporary political theory. It is intended to be broad in scope, including original contributions to political philosophy, and also work in applied political theory. The series will contain works of outstanding quality with no restriction as to approach or subject matter. The series editors are David Miller and Alan Ryan.


General Education in a Free Society

General Education in a Free Society

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  • Author: Harvard University. Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 296


Not for Profit

Not for Profit

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  • Author: Martha C. Nussbaum
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 069117332X
  • Category : Education
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 200

In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad. We increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable, productive, and empathetic individuals. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world. In response to this dire situation, Nussbaum argues that we must resist efforts to reduce education to a tool of the gross national product. Rather, we must work to reconnect education to the humanities in order to give students the capacity to be true democratic citizens of their countries and the world. In a new preface, Nussbaum explores the current state of humanistic education globally and shows why the crisis of the humanities has far from abated. Translated into over twenty languages, Not for Profit draws on the stories of troubling—and hopeful—global educational developments. Nussbaum offers a manifesto that should be a rallying cry for anyone who cares about the deepest purposes of education.


The Battleground of the Curriculum

The Battleground of the Curriculum

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  • Author:
  • Publisher: Stanford University Press
  • ISBN: 9780804765770
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 200

This book examines the current debates about the curriculum in historical context and offers considerations for the future.