Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 320 pages
• Published by: Yale University Press September 25, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0300122888
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0300122886
• Book Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Review
"Kronman unfolds here a sustained argument marked by subtlety, force, nuance, and considerable appeal."-Francis Oakley, President Emeritus, Williams College (Francis Oakley )

"In a brilliant, sustained argument that is as forthright, bold, and passionately felt as it is ideologically unclassifiable and original, Anthony Kronman leaps in a bound into the center of America's cultural disputes, not to say cultural wars. Although Kronman's specific area of concern is higher education, his argument will reach far beyond campus walls."-Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People (Jonathan Schell )

"Just when we need them most, the humanities have relinquished their role at the heart of liberal education-helping students reflect on what makes life worth living. In this bold and provocative book, Anthony Kronman explains why the humanities have lost their way. With eloquence and passion, he argues that departments of literature, classics, and philosophy can recover their authority and prestige only by reviving their traditional focus on fundamental questions about the meaning of life."-Michael J. Sandel, author of The Case against Perfection and Public Philosophy (Michael J. Sandel )

"No question that the humanities are in a terrible way in education at the present, and this book offers not just an argument that they should be more highly prized, but a carefully reasoned position of what happened, why it did, and what requirements and can be done about it."-Alvin Kernan, author of In Plato's Cave (Alvin Kernan )

Product Description

The question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a human being can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education.

 

The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers.  In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years.

 

Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

 

  --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Reader Reviews
This is an important and carefully thought-out book. It's not for the faint of heart, or for anyone looking for a quick, punchy exposé of the current college scene. Rather, it is a deeply reflective and philosophical exploration of the differences in the intellectual objects of the sciences (both social and hard) and of the humanities. By appropriating the "research ideal" of the sciences, one that makes knowledge instrumental to a measurable goal, the humanities have lost sight of their traditional and more important aims, ones that are intrinsic rather than instrumental, that involve learning for its own sake and that bring meaning to life. The substitution of cultural relativism (called here "political correctness") for the pursuit of truth is a second siren's song that has distracted the humanities from its honorable mission. Both these points are important and well made. The book reads like a man's intellectual life's work. His heart is in it. Kronman's study, however, is limited by the narrowness with which he defines the humanities. A law professor and Philosophy BA from WIlliams College, he seems chiefly to be talking about his own undergraduate major, Philosophy (see the appendix where he offers a sample curriculum), which has as one of its clear aims the understanding of "what living is for." That formulation of the central question of the humanities -- and it repeats throughout the book until it becomes almost grating -- is finally a limited (and I might add instrumental) one, that applies less to those branches of the humanities that encompass the arts than it does to Philosophy (or Theology). Much study within the humanities, rather than asking and answering quasi-ecclesiastical questions, offers the pure pleasure of satisfying intellectual curiosity, preserving culture, or simply engaging individual creativity. These also very important functions fall outside of Kronman's analysis, which is therefore not as comprehensive as it might be. The narrowing of the humanities to the navel-gazing suggested by the book's subtitle "Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life" is thus unfortunate. The humanities (and even Kronman's analysis of them) are larger than this question implies. That might sound funny since what larger question is there than "What is living for"? But since it is a question so large as finally to be unanswerable -- and not finally the only concern of the humanities or only the concern of the humanities -- Kronman risks making a serious inquiry feel trivial.