Transforming Knowledge - Softcover

Minnich, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877228809 ISBN 13: 9780877228806

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Transforming Knowledge suggests that education can serve neither the quest for knowledge nor the promise of a genuinely democratic system until some very basic intellectual errors are uncovered and corrected. Examining the heritage of a tradition created primarily by white Euro-American men who considered themselves the norm and the ideal for all humankind, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich identifies these errors, characterizes them, and demonstrates how they work to distort and limit our knowledge. She cites work primarily by feminist scholars and activists, but also from ethnic, peace, and ecological studies, and argues that a reorientation of education and thus thinking and thus knowledge makes sense.

This book is the result of more than twenty years of work in higher education during which the author talked with thousands of faculty members, administrators, students, and community people about the necessity to transform the curriculum in this country. Drawing also on her years of work with Hannah Arendt and on Dewey, Kant, Plato, and Socrates, Minnich confronts the "dominant meaning system" that perpetuates errors in thinking, particularly faulty generalization and universalization, circular reasoning, mystified concepts, and partial knowledge.

In light of the heated debate in which such critics as William Bennett and Allen Bloom charge that a return to "the classics" is the only acceptable route for education, Transforming Knowledge offers a philosophical analysis of the cultural, intellectual, political tradition behind our curriculum. Minnich warns that it is in and through education that a culture, and polity, not only tries to perpetuate but enacts the kinds of thinking it welcomes, and discards and/or discredits the kinds it fears.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich is Professor of Philosophy and of Women s Studies at the Union Graduate School of the Union Institute for Advanced Studies.

From the Inside Flap

"[A]n honest, personal, and compelling account of contemporary efforts to transform the curriculum to include gender, race, and class."
Elizabeth Higginbotham

"A valuable addition to the current critique of the 'canon' in academia."
Reginald Wilson

"A brilliant book which feminists will find exceedingly useful in our daily struggle with traditionalists, and as a tool for the freeing of our own minds."
Gerda Lerner, Women's Review of Books

"The great value of this work is the striving for critical synthesis that it presents. Minnich is drawing upon and drawing together threads of criticism spun by writers of many views and disciplines. Her book is rather like Hume's handbook of philosophical fallacies, except that 'false universalization' (one of Hume's fallacies, too) is here shown to be false on grounds that Hume never dreamt of."
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Wesleyan University, and author of Anna Freud: A Biography

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877228809
• ISBN 13: 9780877228806
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 210