Tag: liberal education

Walking alongside Wisdom: A review of Learning the Good Life

Lying on a bed at 2:00 AM idly flipping through a book while texting a friend isn’t likely to be a transformative experience. Treating education as a hoop to jump through to secure a job, make money, and consume leads to practices serving that end. The authors in this book will challenge our perceptions about what learning is for.

The Absurdity of Teaching

As we approach the new academic year, we, like Sisyphus, are condemned to roll the rock up the hill only for it to roll back down. However, this does not have to be a meaningless task – we can escape the absurdity of our condition. We give ourselves meaning by following either the dogmatist, the activist, or the healer.

The Contradictions within My Students’ Request for Diverse Curricula

The imagined student’s intentions are honorable: to promote racial justice. But when the conversation begins, she has already set herself against the teacher and the course. The task of the teacher is to encourage her pursuit of justice while showing that the Great Books are not enemies, but allies. If this can be done, the student and teacher may even realize the same about each other.

What Groucho Marx Can Teach Us About Liberal Education

The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts...

A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom

Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive...

30 More Years of Rootless Professors

In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and...

Provincializing the University: A Proposal for Reform

Last November, FPR readers may recall, some of our writers held a panel discussion on The Place of Education at the University of Notre...

Liberal Education, Stewardship, and the Cosmopolitan Temptation

Kearneysville, WV. When speaking of the proper care for the natural world, the word that best describes our efforts is stewardship. Stewards are care-takers....