End Of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Volume 1) (Pedagogy and Cultural Practice)

Spanos's book represents a powerful argument against and a brilliant analysis of the liberal humanist project. This is a significant contribution to theongoing and raging debates (see Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Roger Kimaball and most recently Dinesh D'Souza)about the crisis of the humanities. Originally about issues of curriculum and pedagogyin the American Academy in general and in the liberal arts specifically, these debates have since exploded into the expansive context of ideology, cultural politics and realpolitik itself. What is quite literally at stake, says Spanos, is the politics involved in cultural production and its grounding in the master paradigm of the core and the periphery. Ultimately, The End Of Education proposes a new posthumanist theory of diologic pedagogy that accomodates the social and the historical realities of the postmodern condition. The education scholar reads the vanguard of our times through the lessons of Heiddegger and Foucault, in the while undertaking a deconstructive reading of the modern humanist university. Heidegger's critique of the centered circle of Being in metaphysical, scientific, and humanist discourses and Foucault's critique of the panoptic gaze of disciplinary society furthers claims that disclose the interplay between the disinterested pursuit of truth and the development of an ideological state. Spanos argues that both the left (liberals) and the right (consservative)are in complicity in appropriating emergent and different texts and social groups in such a way as to reaffirm the validity of the humanist tradition and thereby the validity of the universalist logic of the project of the Enlightenment that continues to govern out idea of politics and social transformation. This is a tour de force of ambitious vision without which we are the less conscious of where we are and where we are headed. Henry A. Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz are the only two other academics who have engaged this topic with a similar sense of responsibility and independence from the suasive flush of the present paradigms. Important and formidable. Whereas the majority of Spanos's writings have been concerned with Heideggerian applications to curriculum and literary criticism, this foray into cultural politics and disciplinary casting is the work of a scholar inviting the all who might hear to a vision that demands attention, for our very future rests on such a cultural practices.