Chasing down the John Searle quote from Rachel Donadio's aforelinked Revisiting the Canon Wars piece.

 

"There is a certain irony in this in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the "canon" served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked."

John Searle
The Storm Over the University
The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990


 

Reading List
Books on the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Shelves of books on the state of American higher education have appeared over the years, ranging from the historical to the analytical to the downright polemical. The following list presents some highlights from the last half-century of debate over what an educated person should know."

Revisiting the Canon Wars
By RACHEL DONADIO
New York Times, September 16, 2007

"Today it's generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there's a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations."

Michael Silverblatt chats with David Foster Wallace on the occasion of the publication of Infinite Jest. (KCRW's "Bookworm" 4/11/96)

MS: Well, what thrilled me about the book is that around two hundred pages in what I felt about it was that it just began to get better and better and better. I started to like it more and more, and look forward to going back to reading it and felt a kind of, I don't know, tenderness toward it, toward both its characters and its narrator, because of the extraordinary effort that was going into writing it. It didn't seem like difficulty for difficulty's sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said, and that there weren't other ways to say that.

DFW: I feel like I want to ask you to adopt me.

Our Compassless Colleges
By PETER BERKOWITZ
Wall Street Journal September 5, 2007

"At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support -- "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being."

HEROES
The Champions of Our Literary Imagination
By Bruce Meyer
HarperCollins, 273 pages, $34.95

Reviewed by KEITH GAREBIAN
Toronto Globe and Mail, September 8, 2007

"From Gilgamesh to Jesus, from Beowulf to King Arthur, from Hercules to Superman, from Hamlet to King Lear, the most extraordinary heroes live through the pages of literature, tempting us to accompany them on their special quests through life's labyrinths, where they battle foes and obstacles and show how we, ordinary mortals, are joined to them collectively as they attempt to solve the puzzles of their own being."

Canon fodder
For forging higher ideas in young minds, Waller Newell says, there's nothing like the classics of Western civilization.  (Toronto Globe and Mail Sept. 8, 2007)

The Great Books Newsletter, Summer 2007 (pdf) announces the commencement of the eighth academic year The Great Books Academy has offered homeschooling curricula, books, enrollment services, and online classes.

Beyond the Basics: Achieving a Liberal Education for All Children (pdf)
by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Diane Ravitch
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
7/11/2007

"America's true competitive edge over the long haul is not its technical prowess but its creativity, its imagination, its inventiveness. And those attributes are best inculcated not by skill-drill or "STEM" [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education] but through liberal arts and sciences, liberally defined. Thus argues this new Fordham volume, edited by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Diane Ravitch, which also explores what policymakers and educators at all levels can to do sustain liberal learning and sketches an unlovely future if we fail."

A review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, by Elizabeth Kantor

 

"Elizabeth Kantor has undertaken the monumental task of reviving the Western literary canon."

"The [College of the University of] Chicago faculty wondered how students, many just freshmen, could possibly read a classic a week. The eminent classicist Paul Shorey put this question to [President Robert M.] Hutchins, recalling that 'when I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year to study Dante's Divine Comedy.' 'The difference," Hutchins shot back, 'is that our students are bright.'"

THE WAR OF THE GREAT BOOKS
American Heritage Magazine, 1989
by Benjamin McArthur

Speaking of Chomsky, I'm not sure I was aware of this unitl now: here is a transcript, Realaudio soundtrack, and hyperlinked supplementary material to Part I of the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.

Hoover Institution partial digital archive of William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Noam Chomsky? Priceless.

At the end of an annual meeting of the Annapolis Group, a loose association of liberal arts colleges, it was announced that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges had decided to stop participating in the annual college rankings by U.S. News and World Report.

Are Liberal Arts Dead?  Far from it. In fact, liberal arts grads are in high demand in the corporate world.

-By Jamienne Studley

"TheGreatBooks.com  is designed to help Christian educators use the classical model to help each high school student own his or her faith as a total worldview."

A new report contends that fewer and fewer college English majors are being required to study Shakespeare. In a 60-page report titled " The Vanishing Shakespeare," the non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports that only 15 of the 70 colleges and universities it examined require their English majors to take a Shakespeare course.

10 Great Books about Education. A short reading list of works that have inspired the vision of Habele , a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of educational opportunities in the remote islands and atolls of Micronesia, an impoverished former American trust territory in the Central Pacific.

1777 and 1843 editions of the New England Primer .

Mark Edmundson's 1997 Harper's essay On the Uses of a Liberal Education As Lite Entertainment For Bored College Students.

 

Also, a video clip and transcript of his appearance on Booknotes in support of his book Why Read?