When "Academic Questions" editor Peter Wood asked the author to give some thought to the dispute between the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), he thought he should say no. Well, what did the CFR report prepared by an independent task force chaired by Joel I. Klein, former…

One of the main factors implicated in the atomization of contemporary life, both as cause and effect, is the brunt and tenor of modern liberal education. For it cannot be denied that liberal education in the classic sense has severed its mandate to instruct and enlighten from the archive of the past and has been replaced by the concept of…

Since the seventeenth century, there have been two narratives about modernity in general and America in particular. The author uses the term "narrative" to include (a) facts, (b) arguments, and most important, (c) a larger vision of how one sees the world and chooses to engage the world. The first and originalist narrative is the Lockean Liberty…

The agenda of "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future," "commissioned," "funded," and "nurtured" by the U.S. Department of Education, is nothing less than an attempt to implement a "transformation" of America by "transform[ing] current academic norms about what counts as scholarship." The author suggests that people may remember…

This "crucible moment" in which democratic capitalism finds itself does not call for more government mandates to dictate progressive activism in higher education. Rather, this crucible moment calls higher education on its own initiative to focus on the moral foundation that both democracy and capitalism require. The foundation of democratic…

In this article, the author talks about the report "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future," which provides a blueprint of what higher education ought "not" to do. The document was produced by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U), an organization with a long history not only of demanding the advancement of…

A "civic recession" is as worrisome as an economic recession. "A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy's Future" (The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, 2012) should be praised for acknowledging the peril and seeking to rebuild the "depleted civic capital." Welcome, too, is the report's conviction that…

Anthropology began as archeology--not just the archaeology of "prehistoric" human or quasi-human bones and stones, but also the study of other things presumably archaic. The most notable of these was the social life and thought of the world's remaining peoples who could be taken as proxies for those who supplied these bones and used these stones…

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding in order to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line in a time of putative budget deficits.…

The motivation and methodology for measuring intelligence have changed repeatedly in the modern history of large-scale student testing. Test makers have always sought to identify raw aptitude for cultivation, but they have never figured out how to promote excellence while preserving equality. They've settled for egalitarianism, which gives rise to…

Plato wrote that higher order thinking could not start until the student had mastered conventional wisdom. The American educational establishment has turned Plato on his head with the help of a dubious approach to teaching developed by one Benjamin Bloom. Bloom's taxonomy was intended for higher education, but its misappropriation has resulted in…

In our summer 2006 issue, we ran a comprehensive overview of how postmodernism has degraded composition on our campuses. Steve Kogan enlarges that indictment and charges that the movement has deliberately corrupted every area of English instruction--from the acquisition of skills and knowledge to the more fundamental mission of developing in…

How to civilize our young people? Enforcing a pedagogy of virtue is a waste of time. PC curricula reek of Stalinism. Nor does it make much sense to teach popular culture. The media perform that civilizing function all too well. The goal is to impart wisdom, but you can't know it all, so we talk about it as best we can. Fortunately, writes Robert…

Despite the educational platitudes mouthed by his teachers, this former school superintendent came away convinced that they had bought into a relativism that allowed nothing worth knowing, and no way for pupils to know it. It's time, Douglas Sears writes, for Ed Schools to turn out teachers who do more than guide students on the side to "realize…

Socrates taught that contemplation of beauty and knowledge reveals cosmic harmony and the rhythms of the universe. De Tocqueville, however, observed that a modern democracy places more immediate demands on its citizens, preoccupying them with utility and the fear of physical deprivation. Carson Holloway reminds us that liberal education for its…