ENGL 265-01, Special Topics: Essaying Education, Fall 2014

Abstract

"Essaying Education” will survey the philosophy of education through the genre of the essay. To 'essay' means to 'try,' to'attempt.' We will attend to the rhetoric and style of thinkers attempting to argue about how we learn and teach. Figures will be drawn from the classical era (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero), medieval Europe (Augustine, Aquinas), the humanist Renaissance (Petrarch, Montaigne, Bacon, Comenius), the Enlightenment (Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft), Victorian England (Darwin, Marx, Newman), American pragmatism (Emerson, James, Addams, Dewey, Dubois), and more recent critiques (Jacotot, Freire, Arendt, Gatto, Ravitch, Sahlberg). We will also watch selected documentary films (e.g. To Be and To Have; At Berkeley). We will devote particular attention to the literary history of the essay, a form that is itself a mode of speculation. In kind, students will essay their own educational philosophy as part of a scholarly final research project. Topics will inevitably include pedagogy, ignorance, failure, knowledge, equity, and the artes liberales, or "crafts of freedom." Students will be expected to attend two Rhodes symposia on the liberal arts, one sponsored by the Project for the Study of Liberal Democracy (late September), and another sponsored by a grant from the Teagle Foundation (late October). Prerequisites: FYWS 151 or permission from instructor.