Liberal Education: Critical Essays on Professions, Pedagogy, and Structure

Advocating modest educational reform, this book seeks to define more clearly the goals of higher education through a critical appraisal of its nature and promise. The four chapters in Part 1 provide an overview of the intellectual and curricular issues of liberal education, beginning with a view of academic disciplines as professional organizations and an account of the political and economic challenges that structure faced during the 1970s and 1980s. The author then proposes a redefinition of liberal education as "critical-inquiry education" and discusses the curricular and pedagogical principles embodied in such an approach.;Part 2 provides concrete applications of this conception of education, starting with academic advising. Other chapters focus on teacher education, African-American Studies, faculty development, and the proper role of scholarship for teaching faculty.;Part 3 deals with two noncurricular aspects of democratic education: access and equality. One chapter focuses on the possibilities and problems facing historically black colleges and universities in redefining their missions since the end of legal segregation. The other chapter discusses the meaning and implications of variable quality among institutions of higher education, arguing that the democratic portion of educational reform efforts is jeopardized if class tracking in higher education is not explicitly addressed.;This book should prove helpful to administrators and faculty at liberal arts institutions for its view of the problems they face and its solutions to many of those dilemmas. It can also serve as a supplemental text in higher education curriculum and administration courses.