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A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST [1987]

June 8, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING
2 Comments

THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
By
Allan Bloom

Has anything changed in education since the publication [1987] of this evocative and controversial book?

Subtitled: “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”

Again: What is the place of the humanities programs on college campuses?

What should an “educated” person know?

Should there exist a “core” of required readings for all students?

Does any of this really matter in our culture today?

THESE are some of the Great Human Questions HUM 2930.

“The ultimate challenge in education is to go to the individual human being and help her or him become what otherwise he or she would never become.”

interrobang

“DO YOU BELIEVE?” CAREFUL.

April 13, 2015
EDUCATION AND LEARNING, PEOPLE, THINKING AND THOUGHT
6 Comments

BY: JAMES F. O’NEIL

As a teacher of humanities, I often posed a question to myself.  “As a professor of literature and humanities, can I offer my life as an illustration of the benefits that accrue from humanistic studies?”

Does the study of literature and other “humanistic” subjects result in one’s becoming a more decent, liberal, tolerant, and civilized human being? No guarantees, was my answer.

I often thought of Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich, the ideological head of the Nazi Party: at age 24, he earned his PhD in Romantic Drama [Humanities] from Heidelberg University.

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