Higher Education in the Making

George Allan

Description

George Allan argues that the so-called "culture wars" in higher education are the result of the dogmatic and unyielding certainty that both canonists and anti-canonists bring to any discussion of how best to organize an undergraduate curriculum. He then proposes a middle way. Drawing from William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead, he contrasts the absolutist claims of both canonists and anti-canonists with a fallibilist approach and argues for a more pragmatic canon that is normative and always in need of renovation.

A wide variety of voices are heard in Allan's conversation about the nature and meaning of an education canon, including philosophers Aristotle, Descartes, Arthur Lovejoy, Hannah Arendt, Spengler, Emerson, Lyotard, and Rorty. Contemporary voices include Eva Brann, Charles Anderson, Francis Oakley, Martha Nussbaum, Gerald Graff, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Bill Readings.

Acknowledgments

Series Introduction

1. Crumbling Cathedrals

2. Content Canonists

3. Procedural Canonists

4. Anti-Canonists

5. Relative Canonists

6. Canonical Dynamics

7. Canonical Dialectics

8. Pragmatic Canonists

9. Education for a Democracy

10. Religious Education

11. Education for Our Common Good

12. Cathedral Ruins

13. Constructive Pragmatics

Works Cited

Note on Supporting Center

Index

SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Pragmatism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791485552
• Langue: English

Extrait

Higher Education in the Making

SUNY series in Constructive Postmodern Thought

David Ray Griffin, editor

Higher Education in the Making

Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon

George Allan

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

©2004State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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For information, address State University of New York Press, 90State Street, Suite700, Albany, NY12207

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Allan, George,1935–

Higher education in the making : pragmatism, Whitehead, and the canon / George Allan. p. cm. – (SUNY series in constructive postmodern thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN0-7914-5989-6 1. Education, Higher—Curricula—United States.2. Postmodernism and education—United States.3. Pragmatism.4I. Title. II. Series.. Canon (Literature)

LB2361.5.A36 2004 379.199—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2003064726

for Malcolm Evans a gracious friend and persistent critic

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Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

Acknowledgments Series Introduction Crumbling Cathedrals Content Canonists Procedural Canonists AntiCanonists

Relative Canonists Canonical Dynamics Canonical Dialectics

Pragmatic Canonists Education for a Democracy Religious Education

Education for Our Common Good Cathedral Ruins Constructive Pragmatics

Works Cited Note on Supporting Center Index SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought

ix xi 1 17 35 53 71 89 107 127 145 165 183 199 215

233 239 241 245

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Acknowledgments

Chapters1–8are genealogically connected to three essays published long ago. However, those earlier ideas have been greatly transformed—rethought, extended, extruded, modified, melded, cantilevered, tempered, deepened, and distributed in and amongst newer ideas—and so their presence is not always detectable. Nonetheless, these essays deserve mention since they set me on the journey that led to writing this book. They are “The Canon in Crisis,”Liberal Education72(1986):89–100; “The Process and Reality of an Educational Canon,”Contemporary Philosophy12 (1989):3–8; and “Process Philosophy and the Educational Canon,”Process Studies20(1991):93–105. The origi- nal version of this last essay was presented at a “Conference on Process Philosophy of Education: Confluence and Construction,” sponsored by the Association for Process Philosophy of Education, Cornell University,1991, and published in a slightly altered version after long delay as “Modernism, Post-Modernism, and the Pragmatic Recovery of an Educational Canon,” in Robert Neville and Tom Kasulis, eds.,The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Smith(Albany: State University of New York Press,1997),93–114. Excerpts from it, plus some comments about academic deans, appeared as “Political Correctness and the Middling Dean,” American Conference of Academic Deans, Proceedings,January1992:18–25. Chapter9is a slightly modified version of “Playing with Worlds: John Dewey, the Habit of Experiment, and the Goods of Democracy,” published in Soundings79(1996):447–68. A version of chapter10, with a significantly different second section, was published as “Whitehead and Dewey: Religion in the Making of Education,” in Janus A. Polanowski and Donald Shelburne, eds.,Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points of Connection(Albany: State University of New York Press,2004). A briefer version of chapter11, “Weaving Our Common Good,” was a Plenary Lecture at the Third International Whitehead Conference, on Process Thought and the Common Good, sponsored by the Center for Process Studies, Claremont, California,1998. An earlier book of mine,Rethinking College Education(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,1997), used a typology of three kinds of educa- tional purposes institutionalized in American colleges and universities: the Faithful Community, the Guild of Inquirers, and the Resource Center. This