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Indlæser... Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (udgave 1998)af Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath
Work InformationWho Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom af Victor Davis Hanson
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. Academic recruitment campaigns today are not about getting middle-aged people to start to gain pride in an academic brand, they are about getting young people to choose an alma mater they will continue to contribute to for years, in endowments and volunteer time. That’s why Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT and Columbia have such successful clan marketing – whatever is instrumental in developing a resource base for the next five years, even if ironically anti-rational and anti-intellectual – will be a populist argument in favour of whatever resonates with youth of the day. Hanson and Heath are correct about the hollowing out of humanities, but the sciences too are riddled with myopic focus on fashionable applicability. The authors come across as petulant at times about their perceived denigration of the classics, when academia as a whole needs reshaping as effective institutions. Perceived lack of industrial applicability is not the problem of the humanities alone. Hanson and Heath vaguely acknowledge but sidestep the fact that foundational education such as the classics and basic science are referential by nature, to compare theories, data and current trends of specialized and academic sycophantism. As such classics should be practical degree requirements with foundation classes that become more advanced, instead of being offered as a single prerequisite overview course, if at all. Classics do need to be held to a standard of value, as any other field of study and research, and the authors are correct that the attempts to mask their value have had the logical outcome of debasing education generally and the academic institution as a whole. I would have preferred less emphasis on education as a means of personal enrichment versus a means to a career. The defense of strength in classics is not human curiosity and lifetime contemplation, but in the immediate applicability of epistemology in daily, critical decision-making. This work is a good contribution to a long-standing but ill-defined debate. Redefinition of academic parameters and the nature of the academic institution are required for progress to be made. The actual field of classics has declined so these reflections should be taken seriously. As the authors demonstrate, the objections against their thesis are only as petty as their critics, feeble. What the authors uncovered has trickled down to infect higher education, high schools, and finally even elementary schools as the Western tradition has been mocked, ignored, and hidden from recent students who fail to appreciate how crucial the Greeks are to a sound education. You only need to consider the products of higher education to see the feeblemindedness, the sloganeering, and the lack of critical thought for many college graduates and appreciate what the authors have done in this volume. ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
An in-depth study of why the Greek point of view is crucial to a well-rounded education, Who Killed Homer? analyzes how and why it is vanishing from our present-day educational system. With straight-forward advice and reading lists, it is also a highly useful primer for anyone who wants more knowledge of the the classics. No library descriptions found. |
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The book is at its strongest when it's defending the classics themselves, at its worst when it melds conservative US politics with said defense. For anyone outside of the US many of these themes will be familiar, including the watering down of the discipline with increasingly inane cross pollination from other disciplines in a desperate search for relevancy. The last part of the book tries to envision a complete restructuring of the (US) educational system, where the classics are not just a required part, but integral in a more holistic and cross-disciplinary education. While entirely utopian in vision it's a fairly interesting vision of alternative education in its own right. ( )