The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Pedagogy and Cultural Practice, Vol 1)

in This Groundbreaking Work, William V. Spanos Offers A Powerful Contribution To The Impassioned Debates About The Crisis Of The Humanities. Drawing From Various Discourses Of Contemporary Theory (primarily From Heidegger And Foucault), The End Of Education Constitutes A Deconstruction Of The Discourse And Practice Of The Modern Humanist University. Spanos Uses And Transforms Heidegger's Critique Of The Centered Circle Of Being In Metaphysical, Scientific, And Humanist Discourses And Foucault's Critique Of The Panoptic Gaze Of Disciplinary Society To Disclose The Interplay Between Ontology And Sociopolitics And Between The So-called Disinterested Pursuit Of Truth And The Development Of An Ideological State. Spanos Argues That Both The Left (liberal) And The Right (conservative) Are In Complicity In Appropriating Emergent And Different Texts And Social Groups In Such A Way As To Reaffirm The Validity Of The Humanist Tradition And Thereby The Validity Of The Universalist Logic Of The Project Of The Enlightenment That Continues To Govern Our Idea Of Politics And Social Transformation. library Journal spanos (english And Comparative Literature, Suny At Binghamton) Warns That The Turmoil In Higher Education Will Either Reformulate Itself According To The Dominant Culture Paradigm Or Result In Intellectual Discourse That Will Take Into Account Such Issues As Core Curriculum, The Humanities, Political Correctness, And The New World Order. His Highly Academic And Heavily Documented Discussion Draws On The Ideas Of Martin Heidegger And Michel Foucault, As Well As A Number Of Known Theorists, Philosophers, And Critics. Spanos Projects The End Of Humanistic Education, Given Events Since The Vietnam War. Although Written In Postmodern Academic Language, This Book Pulls Together Many Of The Events And Intellectual Ideas Of The 20th Century And Offers A New Perspective. What It Doesn't Offer Is A Vision Of Higher Education In A Posthumanist Context. Recommended For Academic Libraries.-- Nancy E. Zuwiyya, Binghamton City Sch. Dist., N.y. Contents 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 14 1 Humanistic Understanding and the Onto-theo-logical Tradition: The Ideology of Vision 26 2 Humanistic Inquiry and the Politics of the Gaze 50 3 The Apollonian Investment of Modern Humanist Educational Theory: The Examples of Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I. A. Richards 90 4 The Violence of Disinterestedness: A Genealogy of the Educational "Reform" Initiative in the 1980s 143 5 The University in the Vietnam Decade: The "Crisis of Command" and the "Refusal of Spontaneous Consent" 187 6 The Intellectual and the Posthumanist Occasion: Toward a Decentered Paideia 212 Notes 248 Index 296 A 296 B 296 C 297 D 297 E 297 F 298 G 298 H 298 I 299 J 299 K 299 L 299 M 299 N 299 O 300 P 300 R 300 S 301 T 301 U 301 V 301 W 301 A contribution to the ongoing debates about the crisis of the humanities in education - which have exploded into the expansive contexts of ideology, cultural politics, "realpolitik", and humanism itself. Argues for and proposes a post-humanist theory of dialogic pedagogy.