136 pages
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5-1/2 x 8-1/2
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© 2011
One day in 1938, John Dewey
addressed a room of professional educators and urged them to take up the
task of “finding out just what education is.” Reading this lecture in
the late 1940s, Philip W. Jackson took Dewey’s charge to heart and spent
the next sixty years contemplating his words. The stimulating result of
a lifetime of thinking about educating, What Is Education? is a
profound philosophical exploration of how we transmit knowledge in human
society and how we think about accomplishing that vital task.
Most
contemporary approaches to education follow a strictly empirical track,
aiming to discover pragmatic solutions for teachers and school
administrators. Jackson argues that we need to learn not just how to
improve on current practices but also how to think about what education
means—in short, we need to answer Dewey by constantly rethinking
education from the ground up. Guiding us through the many facets of
Dewey’s comments, Jackson also calls on Hegel, Kant, and Paul Tillich to
shed light on how a society does, can, and should transmit truth and
knowledge to successive generations. Teasing out the implications in
these thinkers’ works ultimately leads Jackson to the conclusion that
education is at root a moral enterprise.
At a time when schools increasingly serve as a battleground for ideological contests, What Is Education?
is a stirring call to refocus our minds on what is for Jackson the
fundamental goal of education: making students as well as teachers—and
therefore everyone—better people.
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