Description:After 20 books (e.g., Technopoly, LJ 1/92), Postman, social critic par excellence, has returned to his original turf: education. Sharp, witty, and frequently quotable, he demolishes many leading popular themes as lacking in meaning. Education without spiritual content or, as he puts it, without a myth or narrative to sustain and motivate, is education without a purpose. That purpose used to be democracy and could still be, if only we were willing to look for the elements that unite rather than separate. Postman considers multiculturalism a separatist movement that destroys American unity. Diversity, however, is one of the themes he would employ in teaching language, history, and culture. Postman offers a number of positive and uplifting themes around which a new education philosophy could be formulated, some of which are far-fetched or extreme but nonetheless interesting.

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Description: Imagine the consequences if such polar opposites as Plato and Rousseau opened a school together–the results would be nothing less than schizophrenic. Yet, according to Kieran Egan, author of The Educated Mind, this is exactly the model upon which most of Western education is based. Historically, schools in the West have been chartered to perform three fundamentally contradictory tasks: to socialize children, to encourage conformity, and, at the same time, to develop individual promise. Instead of trying to pound different-shaped pegs into a one-size-fits-all hole, Egan suggests that educators take a new tack: shape learning to the way the human mind develops and understands. Egan begins by defining five types of understanding: Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic. Each kind develops at different points in a child’s life and brings with it new abilities to process and integrate information. Throughout each phase, Egan is particularly concerned with the role of imagination in learning–a crucial role, in his opinion. The Educated Mind is not a textbook about methodology. Rather, it is a meditation on the way the mind grows and learns, and on how teachers–and students–might profit from these developmental stages by shaping lesson plans to fit the mind instead of the other way around.

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Description: Egan argues that some of our assumptions about children’s thought and learning – namely that they cannot handle abstraction and that learning must always start with the familiar and progress to the unknown – are inaccurate or oversimplified. Children are very good at understanding fantasy, which requires them to make sense of big abstract concepts such as Good Versus Evil, and to connect new, unfamiliar information to these abstractions. By using storytelling, rather than the current “assembly line” model for education, the curriculum could become both more memorable and more engaging for students.

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“The key to…rehumanizing [math:] for children is to tie the computational tasks back to the human intentions, hopes, fears, etc. that generated them in the first place. If children can see a particular mathematical computation not simply as a dehumanized skill to be mastered but rather as a particular solution to a particular human hope, intention, fear, or whatever, then we can embed the skill in a context that is meaningful” (p. 77).

“Our science program will be about the human adventure that began in magic and myth and gradually, through individuals’ courage, ingenuity, hopes, and so on, became science. It is a human activity concerned with what works, regardless of what people think, believe, or hope for. It begins, however, in people’s hopes, beliefs, and fears, and makes sense when seen in terms of human intentions. Only very late in its development does it become disinterested inquiry” (p. 97).

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Description: If gaining maturity means being adept at seeing the same set of events from multiple perspectives and contemplating alternative futures, then this concept of adulthood says something about the way our minds work. Bruner’s “constructivist” approach holds that we create our own realities through our interaction with our social world and with symbols. This collection of challenging, often difficult essays takes us beyond his popular On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand, as he explores controversies in the theory of literature, linguistics, cognitive psychology and education. His argument that characters, setting and action are inseparable elements in fiction helps explain why great novels have emotional power. Literature is seen as a vehicle that opens us to dilemmas. Bruner’s outlook illuminates sundry topics, from the way a teacher’s stance toward the curriculum affects the learning process to the idea of culture as “semiconnected knowledge of the world” that enables people to arrive at acceptable ways of acting.

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Description: This book is primarily a historical account of the modernist protest against the disengaged and instrumental modes of thought and action that arose when theistically grounded morality crumbled, but that themselves focused too little upon our inner life, i.e., our powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, which Taylor alleges give meaning to human life. Associating each ideology with a particular conception of our identity as selves, he defends the modern view, keeping in mind that self-realization must recognize that some things are important beyond the self. Taylor rambles somewhat and often talks about ” the good,” as though human beings were fungible in their capacities for appreciation and action; but the wealth of illustrative material and frequent insights are thought-provoking.

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Description: Universities were once largely insular institutions whose purview extended no further than the campus gates. Not anymore. Today’s universities have evolved into multifaceted organizations with complex connections to government, business, and the community. This thought-provoking book by Harold Shapiro, former president of both Princeton University and the University of Michigan, and Chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission under President Bill Clinton, explores the role the modern university should play as an ethical force and societal steward.

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“A crisis in education is usually caused by a crisis in society that calls into question many existing ideas regarding the central issues of knowledge, culture, and society. The crisis fuels meaningful educational debates and propels changes in educational institutions such as universities. By meaningful debates I mean debates that lead to significant changes in the curriculum. Too often, long, drawn-out, and even bitter debates leave little trace on the learning experience of students. We often forget that it is not our internalized ideas regarding what we teach that matters, but what students learn, what they come to care about, and what they themselves become.” (7)

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Education and the Soul of the University

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