Liberal Education & Global Community by Martha Nussbaum.

I feel as though I should have known about this essay before now:

The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy Sayers

Richard Dawkins on Why There Almost Certainly Is No God.

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Education for Mutual Understanding?
Les Reid Jul 21, 04
Humanists and the Religious Education review in Northern Ireland

"Can believers and non-believers find common ground? In N Ireland we are so used to the perennial squabble between two varieties of Christianity that other forms of disagreement (and reconciliation, we hope) tend to be overlooked."

The End of Education
The Fragmentation of the American University

Commonweal
by Alasdair MacIntyre  

"What should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university or college here and now? It should be to challenge its secular counterparts by recovering both for them and for itself a less fragmented conception of what an education beyond high school should be, by identifying what has gone badly wrong with even the best of secular universities. From a Catholic point of view the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university."

Sustainability: the Ultimate Liberal Art
October 20, 2006 issue of The Chronicle Review
By FRANK H.T. RHODES, president emeritus of Cornell University

"Ironic as it may now seem, the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic were regarded by the ancient Greeks as practical and useful skills — so useful, in fact, that they were seen as the indispensable preparation for citizenship, for participation in a free society. And it was in Greece, the same Greece, that science was "invented." How doubly ironic, then, that in our science-driven age, we have so little place for the wisdom of Greece."

Dan Dennett on TEDTalks

Noam Chomsky - Santa Fe in January 2005

Review of Michael Berube's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? 

"In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom said that the goal of a liberal education was to acquaint students with the real alternatives that have been offered to answer the question: "How should I live my life?"  That question is as much aesthetic as political, as much religious as social or intellectual.  At the deepest level, I suppose, we think of The New Criterion as a handmaiden in that never-ending task."  -- Interview with Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of the New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books

Famed First Amendment scholar Leonard W. Levy dies

By Ronald K.L. Collins
First Amendment Center scholar
08.30.06
Leonard Williams Levy, noted educator and American constitutional historian, died last week. His death, previously unreported, was confirmed by his friend and co-author, UCLA Law emeritus professor Kenneth L. Karst. Levy died at his home in Ashland, Ore.

. . .[His] Legacy of Suppression was commissioned by Robert Maynard Hutchins and the Fund for the Republic as a pamphlet; it was a revisionist interpretation of the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment. Levy argued, among other things, that freedom of the press as understood by the Framers meant merely the absence of prior restraints. Objecting to Levy's findings, Hutchins refused to print the work.

Years later, Levy noted that he published Legacy "to spite Hutchins and the Fund."

"Philosophical Stages [is] an interdisciplinary research project experimenting with using dramatic arts to teach philosophy to Bay Area high school students and Stanford undergraduates. " (Stanford News)

 

A description of the project and examples of student work can be found at http://philosophicalstages.org/.

 

 

"Most [business or technology majors] are conservative, not in any intellectual sense, but in the sense (which they admit) of fearfully conforming to the political and economic status quo, to the attitudes that will be expected of them as compliant employees, and to the necessity of looking out for number one in the "Survivor" sweepstakes of the global economy. Such students are not likely to welcome the cognitive dissonance forced on them by humanities courses demanding Socratic self-questioning of their sociopolitical or religious dogmas."

Rethinking the Culture Wars — I
By Donald Lazere
Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 22 '06

"What happened to the precision, discrimination and critical humanism that we celebrate as the hallmarks of liberal education and the Western heritage?" asked the late Edward Said in the June '86 issue of The Nation. This in the context of terrorism, American foreign policy, consensus, and dissent.

"Universities may be churning out capable earners and consumers, says THOMAS HIBBS*, but they are failing to equip students for meaningful lives." (Dallas Morning News, 8/20/06)

* Philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University

Discussed:

-Harry Lewis' Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education -Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons
-Sex!
-Animal House!
-Happy Days!
-Madeleine Levine's The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material -Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
-Newman's The Idea of the University

. . .and more!

Appreciated seeing this editorial in the Seattle Times on the value of a liberal education.

Some of my recent iPod listening

http://www.thegreatideas.org/videosandbooks.html

 

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/csdi/index.html

Dallas Morning News piece in which former deep-sea diver recalls enrolling at Thomas Aquinas College* as "middle age was rapidly closing in."

 

* Catholic "great books" college in Santa Paula, CA modeled on the secular program at St. John's College.  Check out their reading lists:

 

TAC

 

SJC

 

Aspen Times article on the recent controversy surrounding the proposed renaming of the Paepcke Auditorium at the Aspen Institute to Resnick Auditorium, in recognition of a $4 million donation to upgrade the facility from Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

 

And some letters to the editor regarding same.