Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America

Donald Levine, veteran of general education triumphs and tragedies at the University of Chicago, offers a poignant history and a marial-arts-informed proposal for the future. The well-known progenitors of Chicago's radical reforms in liberal arts education (John Dewey, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Richard McKeon--"The Professor" in Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_) are joined here by other heroes--Joe Schwab, Robert Redfield, William McNeil. Levine himself offers an updated form of their discipline for the new century: anyone interested in the future of high-minded higher education in this country, and particularly in rooting that education in a well-understood tradition, ought to read it.