Social Conflict, Education - Philosophy & Social Aspects, United States Studies - General & Miscellaneous, Education - Political Aspects, Higher Education - General & Miscellaneous, Education, Philosophy of
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Overview
Since the late 1980s few issues have sparked more heated debate than the state of American education and the definition of its cultural underpinnings. Indeed, interest in the controversy has made books ranging from The Closing of the American Mind and Illiberal Education to The Culture of Complaint into national best-sellers. Yet, in the torrent of words about political correctness, multiculturalism, relativism, speech codes, the Western canon, and campus racism, are we missing the fundamentals? In Dogmatic Wisdom noted critic and intellectual historian Russell Jacoby charges that the education and culture wars have misled America, diverting public attention from the real ailments that beset education and society. With rare historical insight, Jacoby chronicles how the corrosion of education has sent academics and social critics scrambling for answers. But in the rush they lose sight of basic issues. Conservatives protest that education has lost its mind. Radicals respond that it is better than ever. Commentary stays within the narrow boundaries of curricula, books, and speech. Dogmatists of the right and left fixate on a violent vocabulary but forget a violent world; discuss a few books taught at a few institutions but ignore the state of liberal learning at most schools; and fight for blacks and Latinos in textbooks but remain silent about their fate in society. Much more than a reaction to "political correctness," Dogmatic Wisdom is a wide-ranging polemic, offering vital lessons drawn from the history of educational reform, language revision, and cultural pluralism. Upbraiding conservatives for hypocrisy, academic radicals for cynicism, and liberals for naivete, Jacoby recalls the essential realities of teaching and learning that ideologues of all stripes ignore - and charts an indispensable path through the cultural crises of our time.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In a slashing if not wholly original polemic, UCLA historian Jacoby ( The Last Intellectuals ) charges that academic debates over multiculturalism, politically correct language, free speech and curriculum are largely diversionary, shifting attention away from more pressing problems. The rising costs of education, fewer teachers, declining resources, alienated students, the gentrification of higher education (i.e., the increasing dominance by the wealthy of select universities)--these are issues we should be focusing on, Russell argues. Puncturing conservatives' frequent charges that corrosive relativism and left-liberal views have taken over the campus, Jacoby does an expert demolition job on Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education . At the same time, he cautions that cultural pluralism on campus may foster a new parochialism, fueling hostility and divisiveness as ``African-Americans study African-Americans; Latinos study Latinos; women study women.'' (Apr.)Library Journal
Jacoby ( The Last Intellectuals, LJ 9/1/87) argues that while liberals and conservatives fight over which books to use in the classroom, the real issues--e.g., rising violence, little appetite for reading--are being ignored.Booknews
Jacoby (The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe) charges that the education and culture wars have misled America, diverting public attention from the real ailments that beset education and society. Upbraiding conservatives for hypocrisy, academic radicals for cynicism, and liberals for naivete, he recalls the realities of teaching and learning that the ideologues ignore. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Ray Olson
The author of "The Last Intellectuals" (1987) cannot write an uninteresting book, which is fortunate when he turns to a subject that has nearly been done to death: the campus culture wars over the curriculum, speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and "tenured radicals." Jacoby takes up all six of those aspects of the great conflict and never fails to bring more light than heat to each. He traces those supposedly new developments historically, thereby demonstrating, for example, that what's now called multiculturalism arose out of anxieties about America as melting pot that are as old as the last century. He also exposes the meretriciousness of some conservative alarmists on those topics and the self-aggrandizement of some leftist academics. Yet culture-war combatants don't address the real crises in American education, Jacoby says, which are the slow death of the liberal arts and sciences on nearly all campuses and the transformation of universities into advanced business and professional training academies. Those trends reflect an even larger crisis: the commercialization of education at all levels to quickly produce good consumers who as teenagers go to work to afford designer duds and production-line pop music rather than acquire the knowledge earlier generations of full-time teen students were expected to imbibe. Jacoby's overarching argument ultimately seems more profoundly conservative--and liberal, for that matter--than any of those he criticizes in these pages.Book Details
Published
April 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : Doubleday, c1994.
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780385425162