Humanizing Education Policy

Course Description

Americans have long cared about preserving a tradition of liberal arts education, seeing it as key to a free society of citizens with both the knowledge and virtue to sustain self-governance and to advance social order and prosperity. This graduate introduction to the philosophical debates that have shaped the goals and practices of American educational policies, curricula, and institutions will ask scholars to identify challenges and opportunities for revitalizing American educational systems and culture.

Using the works of philosophers Augusto del Noce, Paolo Freire, John Dewey, and Jacques Maritain, and theologians John Cardinal Henry Newman, Jean Leclerq, and Luigi Giussani, this class will explore a variety of competing debates in philosophy of education, connecting these theories of human nature and the roles of society and government to educational curricula and policy. Scholars will be asked to question the role education policy, curricula, and institutions play in shaping culture and politics and promoting human progress in a diverse society founded on freedoms of religion, conscience, speech, and association.

Concepts covered

• The philosophical underpinnings of today’s education system
• Philosophical anthropology in modernity
• How differing views of human nature affect the way we teach
• Integral humanism
• Freedom of conscience in education
• Pragmatist, Marxist, classical liberal and religious approaches to education