Author: Fareed Zakaria Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393247694 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 93
Book Description
CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.
Author: Michael S. Roth Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300206550 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Contentious debates over the benefits—or drawbacks—of a liberal education are as old as America itself. From Benjamin Franklin to the Internet pundits, critics of higher education have attacked its irrelevance and elitism—often calling for more vocational instruction. Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, believed that nurturing a student’s capacity for lifelong learning was useful for science and commerce while also being essential for democracy. In this provocative contribution to the disputes, university president Michael S. Roth focuses on important moments and seminal thinkers in America’s long-running argument over vocational vs. liberal education. Conflicting streams of thought flow through American intellectual history: W. E. B. DuBois’s humanistic principles of pedagogy for newly emancipated slaves developed in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s educational utilitarianism, for example. Jane Addams’s emphasis on the cultivation of empathy and John Dewey’s calls for education as civic engagement were rejected as impractical by those who aimed to train students for particular economic tasks. Roth explores these arguments (and more), considers the state of higher education today, and concludes with a stirring plea for the kind of education that has, since the founding of the nation, cultivated individual freedom, promulgated civic virtue, and instilled hope for the future.
Author: James V. Schall Publisher: ISI Books ISBN: 9781882926534 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
A Georgetown professor’s look at the subjects one needs to study for a truly well-rounded education. A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning is an inviting conversation with a learned scholar about the content of an authentic liberal arts education. It surveys ideas and books central to the tradition of humanistic education that has fundamentally shaped our country and our civilization. This accessible volume argues for an order and integration of knowledge so that meaning might be restored to the haphazard approach to study currently dominating higher education. Freshly conveying the excitement of learning from the acknowledged masters of intellectual life, this guide is also an excellent blueprint for building one’s own library of books that matter.
Author: Victoria Tillson Evans Publisher: ISBN: 9780692082720 Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
The college planning and application process is not an impenetrable mystery. The sooner you understand how it works, the sooner you can empower your child to make informed college decisions. Stop procrastinating!This book tells the story of Michelle, a determined mom who will stop at nothing to ensure that her son, Jack, has plenty of choices for college. When Jack announces he needs to start thinking about college, Michelle panics -- but only for a moment. Stairway to College Heaven traces Michelle's journey from confusion to confidence. Led by three enthusiastic, nacho-loving guides, Michelle discovers the obstacles that lurk ahead and finds the strategies to overcome them.Victoria Tillson Evans, Jonathan Perkins, and Phil Sung, have teamed up to bring you a wealth of practical advice about your family's college journey. Victoria earned her BA from Johns Hopkins University and her AM and PhD from Harvard University; she runs Distinctive College Consulting in Bethesda, Maryland. Jon earned his BA from Stanford University and his JD from Harvard Law School; he offers college counseling services through Essaywise in Palos Verdes Estates, California. Phil earned his BA from Stanford; he provides college counseling and ACT/SAT test prep services through Essaywise in Palo Alto, California. The Stairway to College Heaven awaits. Are you ready to take the first step?
Author: Anne Colby Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1118038711 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Business is the largest undergraduate major in the United States and still growing. This reality, along with the immense power of the business sector and its significance for national and global well-being, makes quality education critical not only for the students themselves but also for the public good. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's national study of undergraduate business education found that most undergraduate programs are too narrow, failing to challenge students to question assumptions, think creatively, or understand the place of business in larger institutional contexts. Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education examines these limitations and describes the efforts of a diverse set of institutions to address them by integrating the best elements of liberal arts learning with business curriculum to help students develop wise, ethically grounded professional judgment.
Author: Darryl Gless Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 9780822311997 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
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
Author: Lee Trepanier Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498538614 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 168
Book Description
The humanities in American higher education is in a state of crisis with declining student enrollment, fewer faculty positions, and diminishing public prestige. Instead of recycling old arguments that have lost their appeal, the humanities must discover and articulate new rationales for their value to students, faculty, administrators, and the public. Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education is an attempt to do so by having philosophers, literature and foreign language professors, historians, and political theorists defend the value and explain the worth of their respective disciplines as well as illuminate the importance of liberal education. By setting forth new arguments about the significance of their disciplines, these scholars show how the humanities can reclaim its place of prominence in American higher education.
Author: Timothy W. Burns Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317689798 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
Liberal Education, once the whole of American Higher Education, has been displaced by technical training and career-oriented majors. But it has also suffered from the decline in genuine liberal learning found in humanities disciplines, owing to specialization, politicization, and the adoption of new literary and psychological theories. The social sciences, too, have arguably abandoned the kind of relentless and sometimes disturbing questioning that used to constitute the core of education. In this compelling volume, thirteen college educators describe in sparkling prose what liberal education is, its place in a liberal democracy, the very serious challenges it faces in the 21st century—even from some of its alleged friends—and why it is important to sustain and expand liberal education’s place in American colleges and universities. Proponents and critics of liberal education alike will benefit from these insightful essays. This book was originally published as a special issue of Perspectives on Political Science.
Author: Andrew Delbanco Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691246386 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
The strengths and failures of the American college, and why liberal education still matters As the commercialization of American higher education accelerates, more and more students are coming to college with the narrow aim of obtaining a preprofessional credential. The traditional four-year college experience—an exploratory time for students to discover their passions and test ideas and values with the help of teachers and peers—is in danger of becoming a thing of the past. In College, prominent cultural critic Andrew Delbanco offers a trenchant defense of such an education, and warns that it is becoming a privilege reserved for the relatively rich. In describing what a true college education should be, he demonstrates why making it available to as many young people as possible remains central to America's democratic promise. In a brisk and vivid historical narrative, Delbanco explains how the idea of college arose in the colonial period from the Puritan idea of the gathered church, how it struggled to survive in the nineteenth century in the shadow of the new research universities, and how, in the twentieth century, it slowly opened its doors to women, minorities, and students from low-income families. He describes the unique strengths of America’s colleges in our era of globalization and, while recognizing the growing centrality of science, technology, and vocational subjects in the curriculum, he mounts a vigorous defense of a broadly humanistic education for all. Acknowledging the serious financial, intellectual, and ethical challenges that all colleges face today, Delbanco considers what is at stake in the urgent effort to protect these venerable institutions for future generations.
Author: Fareed Zakaria
Author: Michael S. Roth
Author: James V. Schall
Author: William Moner
Author: Victoria Tillson Evans
Author: Anne Colby
Author: Darryl Gless
Author: Lee Trepanier
Author: Timothy W. Burns
Author: Andrew Delbanco