A review of Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West by AC Grayling. The glory of the West is that life is an open book: One of the strangest of recent movements in the world of education has been that promoting "multiculturalism" and attacking the traditional humanities for their "ethnocentricity". The great persuader: Eric Hobsbawm's essays on today's politics are unconventional and astringent. Hardly surprising for a world-famous historian whose communism provoked decades of controversy. A review of Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror By Michael Burleigh. From Telos, notes on an international conference on the nature and evolution of "European political thought after 1989 between globalization and new humanism".
An excerpt from Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller. A review of Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman. A review of God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin. An interview with David Dockery, author of Renewing Minds: Serving Church and Society through Christian Higher Education. Inspired by Aquinas: Like many academics, Christopher Wolfe has lots of ideas about what the ideal university should be. Unlike all but a handful, though, he’s decided to take action in a big way, by creating a new institution. Dinesh D’Souza says Boston College is withholding videotape of a debate on the book he conducted there with the scholar Alan Wolfe — because it shows that the college’s "intellectual emperor has no clothes". The ugly side of student politics: How one university's council collapsed into chaos, corruption and threatened lawsuits.
Edward J. Eberle (RWU): Religion and State in the Classroom: Germany and the United States. A review of Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade by Linda Perlstein; Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol; The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle by Dan Brown; and A Class Apart by Alec Klein. From Mclean's, fact check: Do boys really learn better from female teachers?; and a growing body of evidence suggests grades don't predict success — C+ students are the ones who end up running the world. The Numbers Guy takes a closer look at SAT score declines. Art for our sake: School arts classes matter more than ever, but not for the reasons you think.
