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: ‘while dance educators may be attempting to “free” students through an arts education based on the techniques of modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, whose techniques offer an expressive means to communicate art, they may not be aware of how power actually plays out in the dance classroom’ (Green 2002–3: 120). Green places Graham and Cunningham outside of her otherwise grim reading of technique as repressive. She reads their technique as a way to bring the inner subjectivity towards a communal, shared space. This critique enables us to 19
educated citizens, no democracy can remain stable.1 Her argument confronts the increasing tendency across universities to treat a degree not as a part of helping develop citizens but rather as producing consumers—a tendency that should be resisted. But her argument also helps affirm an underlying democratic ideal upon which a liberal arts education functions— that a key skill it teaches is a methodological one about being able to engage thoughtfully in the production and critique of knowledge. However, there are also political downsides to an approach that prioritizes
greatest number of people possible have the opportunity to participate in a meaningful way. This is not just about education—and the need for a liberal arts education that includes training in how knowledge production works, and of methodology—but also about professional opportunities, a functioning infrastructure, and a transparent and accountable system of politics. Another way to think about this is to ask ourselves who ends up participating in politics and whether or not we actually think they are the right people. That we view politicians largely with disdain as
schools and, later on, colleges met a set of nationally agreed standards (Selden, 1960; Kimmell et al., 1998). Between the First and Second World Wars, college enrolments remained rather small, and the most common examination forms were essays and oral examinations. Despite the introduction of electives, most students still received a fairly comprehensive liberal-arts education. The GI Bill introduced after the Second World War not only increased student numbers; it also changed their composition and their educational paths. Many older students were admitted to colleges