Liberal Education And Its Discontents

What explains the peculiar trajectory of the university and liberal education in India? Can we understand the crisis in the university in terms of the idea of education underlying it? This book explores these vital questions and traces the intellectual history of the idea of education and the cluster of concepts associated with it. It probes into the cultural roots of liberal education and seeks to understand its scope, effects and limits when transplanted into the Indian context. With an extensive analysis of the philosophical writing on the idea of university and education in the West and colonial documents on education in India, the book reconstructs the ideas of Gandhi and Tagore on education and learning as a radical alternative to the inherited, European model. The author further reflects upon how we can successfully deepen liberal education in India as well as construct alternative models that will help us diversify higher learning for future generations. Lucid, extensive and of immediate interest, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in the history and philosophy of education and culture, social epistemology, ethics, postcolonial studies, cultural studies and public policy.

Education and Its Discontents: Teaching, the Humanities, and the Importance of a Liberal Education in the Age of Mass Information, by Mark Moss, is an exploration of how the traditional educational environment, particularly in the post-secondary world, is changing as a consequence of the influx of new technology. Students come to the classroom or lecture hall expecting to have their habits and tastes, gleaned from the online world, replicated in an Educational environment. Faculty who do not adapt face enormous obstacles, and faculty that do adapt run the risk of eroding the integrity of what they have been trained to teach. Students now have access to myriad of technologies that instead of supplementing the educational process, have actually taken it over. Issues that run from plagiarism to the erosion of the humanities are now rampant concerns in the post secondary world. Behavior issues, YouTube videos, cell phones, and the incessant clicking of the computer keys are just a few of the technologies altering the educational landscape. Moss discusses that it is now not only how we learn, but what we continue to teach, and how that enormously important legacy is protected. Education and Its Discontents: Teaching, the Humanities, and the Importance of a Liberal Education in the Age of Mass Information, by Mark Moss, argues that education has changed and the supremacy of the book and the lecture is now open for debate. What has been gained over the last five hundred years is now susceptible to the vagaries of technology, which compel us to question their continuing relevance.

Considering the role of alternate political traditions in liberalism's downfall, 'Liberalism and its Discontents' shows how historical interpretation has been a reflection of liberal assumptions.

American culture is changing, a sentiment echoed in phrases such as “the new normal,” and “in these uncertain times,” that regularly introduce all forms of public discourse now, signally a national sense of vulnerability and transformation. Cultural shifts generally involve multiple catalysts, but in this collection the contributors focus on the role changing discourse norms play in cancel culture, corporatism, the counter-sexual revolution, racialism, and a radically divided political climate. Three central themes arise in the arguments. First, that contemporary discourse norms emphasize outcomes rather than shared understanding, which support institutional and political goals but contribute to the contemporary political divide, and the notion that we are engaged in a zero-sum game. These discourse norms give rise to a form of Adorno’s administered world, such that we order society according to dominant opinions, which generally means those well acclimated to institutional and corporate culture. Finally, as Arendt feared, the personal has become political, meaning that the toxic public discourse invades private discourse, reducing personal autonomy and leaving us perpetually under the scrutiny of institutional authority.

Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation’s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Within this area of consensus, however, the contributors display a wide range of approaches, illuminating the issues from the perspectives of their particular disciplines—classics, education, English, history, and philosophy, among others—and their individual experiences as teachers. Among the topics they discuss are canon-formation in the ancient world, the idea of a “common culture,” and the educational implications of such social movements as feminism, technological changes including computers and television, and intellectual developments such as “theory.” Readers interested in the controversies over American education will find this volume an informed alternative to sensationalized treatments of these issues. Contributors. Stanley Fish, Phyllis Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Henry A. Giroux, Darryl J. Gless, Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, George A. Kennedy, Bruce Kuklick, Richard A. Lanham, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Alexander Nehamas, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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.

In a pathbreaking new assessment of the shaping of black male identity in the early twentieth century, Martin Summers explores how middle-class African American and African Caribbean immigrant men constructed a gendered sense of self through organizational life, work, leisure, and cultural production. Examining both the public and private aspects of gender formation, Summers challenges the current trajectory of masculinity studies by treating black men as historical agents in their own identity formation, rather than as screens on which white men projected their own racial and gender anxieties and desires. Manliness and Its Discontents focuses on four distinct yet overlapping social milieus: the fraternal order of Prince Hall Freemasonry; the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, or the Garvey movement; the modernist circles of the Harlem Renaissance; and the campuses of historically black Howard and Fisk Universities. Between 1900 and 1930, Summers argues, dominant notions of what it meant to be a man within the black middle class changed from a Victorian ideal of manliness--characterized by the importance of producer values, respectability, and patriarchy--to a modern ethos of masculinity, which was shaped more by consumption, physicality, and sexuality. Summers evaluates the relationships between black men and black women as well as relationships among black men themselves, broadening our understanding of the way that gender works along with class, sexuality, and age to shape identities and produce relationships of power.

Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.