The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience'The crisis of liberal education is ... an intellectual crisis of the first magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.' These doomsday words of Allan Bloom in 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 obscure, the product of many different attitudes and historical intentions. |
Contents
I Prologue | 1 |
The Free Elective System vs a Trinity of Studies | 9 |
III Ancients Moderns and the Rise of Liberal Education | 22 |
The Idea of a University and Culture and Anarchy | 39 |
The Politics of Counterrevolution 18841909 | 51 |
Aspirations to Order | 68 |
Harvards Redbook the 1960s and the Image of Democracy | 88 |
VIII Orbs Epicycles and the Wars of Culture | 100 |
IX What to Do? | 112 |
Appendix Edgar Eugene Robinson Citizenship in a Democratic World 1928 | 129 |
Notes | 147 |
Works Cited | 155 |
| 167 | |
Other editions - View all
The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience W. B. Carnochan No preview available - 1993 |
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