Stanley Fish reviews some recent books on education. The first is by a proponent of home-school "classical education," Leigh Bortins, who argues that each subject "can be mastered by the rigorous application of the skills of the classical Trivium, grammar, the study of basic forms, logic, the skill of abstracting from particulars and rhetoric, the ability to 'speak and write persuasively and eloquently about any topic while integrating allusions and examples from one field of study to explain a point in another.'" The third, by Diane Ravitch, critiques No Child Left Behind as an elaborate example of 'juking the stats' [not her phrase, or Fish's, but still...]
The second is a plea by Martha Nussbaum for the place of the Humanities for the training of citizens in democracies, within the context of an increasingly profit-driven global educational system...The first chapter is available online at Princeton University Press; cf. also Nussbaum's book from the late 90s, Cultivating Humanity...
[Thanks to rogueclassicism...]
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