Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education - Softcover

Graff, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393311139 ISBN 13: 9780393311136

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993

Synopsis

"Graff offers a highly readable and down-to-earth perspective on some of the most ballyhooed issues in higher education today. . . . By encouraging us to argue together, he may yet help us to reason together."―Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Higher education should by a battleground of ideas: the real problem, Gerald Graff says, is that students are not getting more out of the battle. In this lively book, Graff argues that the "culture wars" now being fought over multiculturalism and political correctness are actually a sign of the intellectual vitality of American education―but they need to be used creatively, made part of the educational process itself.

About this title

About the Author

Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and 2008 president of the Modern Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.

From Publishers Weekly

Decrying conservatives who claim higher education offers a choice between culture and barbarism, University of Chicago English professor Graff argues eloquently for a curriculum that includes political debates and multicultural texts. Though he brushes away charges of left-wing McCarthyism too easily, he skewers critic Dinesh D'Souza's claim that dead white males are being expelled firom required courses. Graff suggests that conservatives' only strategy to deal with conflicting views is to deny their legitimacy, and he wisely notes that the term common culture is always evolving. Using evidence from his own teaching, Graff shows how incorporating literary criticism written by the African novelist Chinua Achebe helped revise his teaching of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He suggests that the ideological conflicts that accompany the curricular problem are getting students to grapple with ideas. Observing that students often have teachers with conflicting beliefs and assumptions in different classes, Graff concludes by surveying current innovative attempts at curriculum integration; oddly, he doesn't mention his own university's Great Books program.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0393311139
• ISBN 13: 9780393311136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 226