EducationThe failure to decide what students should be required to learn keeps the teacher from functioning as, and perhaps from becoming, a responsible adult. There is no one to teach young people but older people, and so the older people must do it. That they do not know enough to do it, that they have never been smart enough or experienced enough or good enough to do it, does not matter. They must do it because there is no one else to do it. This is simply the elemental trial—some would say the elemental tragedy—of human life: the necessity to proceed on the basis merely of the knowledge that is available, the necessity to postpone until too late the question of sufficiency and the truth of that knowledge. — Wendell Berry
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Means and ends in teaching and learning*
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Selected Publications by Donald Levine
BooksPowers of the Mind:The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
REVIEWS of Powers of the Mind. The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age. Essays in Honor of Donald N. Levine. Edited by Charles Camic and Hans Joas. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. ArticlesInterview: “Donald Levine discusses liberal education and his new book, Powers of the Mind.” The Midway Review 2 (2) 34-36, 2007.
"The Idea of the University, Take One: On the Genius of This Place." 2000. "Further Reflections on the Hutchins Legacy." 1993. "Classics and Conversations," in General Education in the Social Sciences: Centennial Reflections on the College of the University of Chicago, ed. John MacAloon. 103-14. University of Chicago Press, 1992. |
"Simmel as Educator: On Individuality and Modern Culture," Theory, Culture and Society 8, 99-117. 1991. "The Physical Sciences among the Liberal Arts," Proceedings of the Chicago Conferences on Liberal Education 1, 1-10. 1986. "The Liberal Arts and the Martial Arts," Liberal Education, 70 (3), Fall, 235-51, 1984. "Ironies of a Convocation," The University of Chicago Record XVII, No. 1. March 31, 1983. "Facing Our Calling: Sociology and the Agon of Liberal Education." 1971 |
Recommended Reading
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Of all things, communication
is the most wonderful. — John Dewey |
Education is a kind of continuing
dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view. — Robert Maynard Hutchins |
Education is conversation about the meaning of life, as each person sees some part of it,
on behalf of everyone. — Robert Redfield |
A student should emerge from such a general education with a knowledge of how problems, whether of life or of science or of art,
have been treated, and with some insight therefore into how problems may be treated; and, joined to that knowledge, he should possess
an ability to understand positions other than his own, to present his own convictions relevantly, lucidly, and cogently,
and finally to apply informed critical standards to his own arguments and those advanced by others.
— Richard McKeon
have been treated, and with some insight therefore into how problems may be treated; and, joined to that knowledge, he should possess
an ability to understand positions other than his own, to present his own convictions relevantly, lucidly, and cogently,
and finally to apply informed critical standards to his own arguments and those advanced by others.
— Richard McKeon