|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Idea of a University: John Henry Newman and the Need for Ideology in Education
| Article
# : |
20289 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,533 Words |
| Author
: |
Michael Patrick Gillespie
Michael Patrick Gillespie is associate professor of English
at Marquette University in Milwaukee. |
For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Bolylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far a known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.
--The Education of Henry Adams
Over the last few years, a number of books have appeared, all written by prominent scholars teaching at prestigious American universities, that seemingly echo the disdain expressed by Henry Adams in the epigraph to this essay. Two studies--Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987)--in fixing attention upon what their authors perceived as constituent flaws in higher education, have gained a measure of notoriety normally reserved for the memoirs of film stars of former presidential advisers. This attention and the notice given to similar recent publications suggest deeply felt needs to reexamine the intellectual principles conditioning the ay Americans perceive the world.
Hirsch, Bloom, and the others combine a sense of clear-eyed certitude regarding their own positions with the popular tendency to see experience in numerical terms. They do not form their analyses as hermeneutic debates--not even to the extent of offering their views on how one goes about interpreting specific pieces of information. Instead, they engage pedagogical issues at the quantitative level, tallying how much we as a society do not know. The epistemological dispositions that shape our current perceptions--why we feel the need to know some things and not others--are overlooked, with no one attempting to justify the body of knowledge deemed so important. And certainly, none of these authors raise ontological questions of what there is to know or what the essence of knowing is. In essence, they tell us about fixed bodies of information that we should know, but they rarely make the effort to explain just how that information came to be constituted.
A Critique Of Bloom And Hirsch
Bloom's work, portentously subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, presents perhaps the most graphic illustration of the drawbacks
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
