gary writes
>it goes far deeper than skinner and parsons, alas... if the goal of
>liberal education is to free the learner from the tyranny of being born at
>a particular place and time, then we are increasingly becoming the jailers
>of contemporary culture. not once in my own formal education was i
>exposed
>to the thoughts of some of the great minds of all time, including but not
>limited to -- duns scotus, james joyce, lao tsu, and if we exclude those
>folks who were merely mentioned, like aquinas and confucious, then the
>list
>stretches out endlessly...
i just finished reading Cynthia Ozik's novel, "The Cannibal Galaxy,"
(fiction! how scandalous!)
about a Jewish man who, as a boy orphaned by Nazi occupation in Paris, is
harboured by nuns during WWII - As a man, he opens his own school in
midwestern America, creating a curriculum to emulate the texts that
surrounded him as a child in hiding; a school dedicated to teaching the
"classics" of European culture, and the moral teachings of Hebrew
scholarship and religion, something he calls a "Dual Curriculum."
the effect is not how students are inspired by canons of the typified
"European" education, but how school teaches children to be good students
in spite of learning; how schools hail mediocrity as excellence.... Alas,
there is more here than curriculum. Undoing what school is requires
greater deconstruction into what school is not, as much as what a
"liberal" education might yet be, doncha think?
diane
************************************************************************************
"Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a
cigarette in a gutter - all are stories. But which is the true story? That
I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard,
waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making
this note and then another, I do not cling to life."
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.
(...life clings to me...)
*************************************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
vancouver, bc
mailing address: 46 broadview avenue, montreal, qc, H9R 3Z2
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