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particular difficulties, both conceptual and practical, in liberal education, and there is a strong analogy between the difficulties involved in teaching people to be autonomous and bringing them up on the idea of tolerance. The present chapter will focus on the problems of education to toleration. Its aim is primarily philosophical, that is, to expose the elusive nature of the very idea of toleration and its implications in education and to discuss some psychological and practical obstacles in educating the young to adopt a tolerant attitude to others. The fundamental
the republicans in power did endorse a more ‘comprehensive’ than ‘political’ understanding of laïque morality, this was translated almost exclusively – though crucially – into a distinctive philosophy of education. On the republican view, it is the chief mission of state schools to inculcate children with the skills essential to the exercise of autonomy. Now, it is true that in matters of education, the distinction between political and comprehensive liberalism is elusive.24 Liberal education promotes individual autonomy without necessarily being ipso facto
European debate. In American sociology and history of the 1950s and 1960s, ‘the German university’ had been branded a hotbed of reactionism – anti-democratic and illiberal, dedicated to metaphysics, and a forum for social preservation. Brandser argues that a reinterpretation occurred during the following decades: Humboldt was combined with a tradition of Anglo-Saxon liberal education at a time of an accelerating market adaptation of the university; and it was in this form that Humboldt’s ideas returned to Europe. As in all such processes of circulation, the transfer from
Afterword: monstrous markets – neo-liberalism, populism and the demise of the public university John Holmwood, Jan Balon There is a crisis in the idea of the university. It has emerged from the application of neo-liberal policies which have reduced the public values of the university to instrumental purposes. This poses a considerable threat to liberal education (Brown, 2015, Collini, 2012; Ginsberg, 2011; Holmwood, 2011; Nussbaum, 2010). In the UK, government ministers and policy advisers seek a ‘cultural’ change directing academic research and student
conservative attack on educational and artistic standards, represented in Bloom’s 1987 jeremiad on American liberal education, The Closing of The American Mind, and in Kramer’s various media pronouncements on political correctness in the arts. 19 Troubled by the so-called ‘politicisation of the academy
the Theodor Adorno or the Walter Benjamin in each of us. Here, every document of civilisation can be exchanged, quite directly, for a document of barbarism – and vice versa, too, or Blood-for-Roses if you like. Crake and Jimmy acquire a liberal education by playing the game, and each becomes a more critical thinker as a result. Or so Atwood suggests. (It says something about the redemptive way in which most novels continue to be read and received that while the hymns Atwood wrote for The Year of the Flood have been set to music by a composer from California (see the
. Cosmopolitan education and the international In this section, I discuss cosmopolitan education, which is the prominent approach to thinking about pedagogy and the international. I focus in particular on Martha Nussbaum's influential account of cosmopolitan education, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Nussbaum 1997 ). I
working (Mora et al., 2010). Global competiveness is the game, we are told, among cities, regions and nations, with success being dependent on the creation and support of large numbers of well-educated, disciplined and flexible workers and managers. It is also critically important to note that, over the past twenty-five years, we have seen the dismantling of many of the structures put in place in our universities as early as the late nineteenth century, for the sharing of knowledge with communities. In England, liberal education is a song sung by increasingly nostalgic
Page 52 The 1970s food, the most pressing problems of social policy and public order. But the University was properly concerned with liberal education as well as with vocational training. Manchester’s Muhammad Ali mentality might provoke iconoclasm, its boastfulness barely conceal a fundamental insecurity. But David Aaronovitch, who read history at Manchester in the mid-1970s after spending a year at Oxford, a southerner not easily impressed by the self-congratulation of the north, found that ‘an enormous . . . and tolerant, liberal academic institution, full of
of nature over culture, and of science over Arnoldian values (truth and beauty). Nature should lead men, and culture itself, too long locked up by the ‘Levites in charge of the ark of culture and monopolists of liberal education’, should be transformed to reflect better the new priorities given by ‘the definite order’ of nature (Huxley, 1881 : 3, cited in Hultberg, 1997 : 196). Knocking the Two Cultures debate out of its place in this line of succession can be productive. It enables a different kind of auditing of the arguments. Doing this