As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education - Hardcover

Miller, Richard E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801434831 ISBN 13: 9780801434839

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Although the culture wars have preoccupied the nation for the past two decades, these impassioned debates about the function of education have produced few lasting institutional changes. The author of this volume shows why the system of higher education has been particularly resistant to reform. Unravelling stereotypes about conservative, liberal and radical reform efforts, Miller looks at what has actually happened when theories about education have been put into practice. What did Matthew Arnold do as a school inspector to promote the study of "the best that has been thought and said in our time"? Why did the Great Books programme fail at the University of Chicago and succeed at a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, Maryland? How did Tony Bennett and others involved in the radical work of British Cultural Studies test their students' knowledge of popular culture? How did ethnographers of schooling respond when they encountered students with apparently racist attitudes? By raising such questions, the book seeks to focus attention on how students, teachers and administrators experience life in the academy as they negotiate the daily realities of reading lists, writing assignments, grading practices and funding crises. By juxtaposing what educators think about social change with what these same people actually do in the classroom, Miller intends to identify ways to generate locally effective reform objectives for the university as it retools for the information age.

About this title

From the Author

Advance praise for AS IF LEARNING MATTERED
"For all those frustrated by seemingly endless proposals and counter-proposals for educational reform, by the tensions between intellectual dreams and bureaucratic realities, As If Learning Mattered is a must read. This is a brave book that moves compellingly from critique to action." Andrea A. Lunsford, Ohio State University

"Richard Miller writes about the history of reform in English studies with great insight. The lesson no one wants to learn is that teachers are bureaucrats, functionaries in a system that hinges on acts of evaluation and assessment (the 'credentializing' often scorned by reformers). In sharp distinction from the herd of commentators who see this function of the teacher as something only to be denounced, Miller observes that the inescapable role of agent provides the intellectual with his or her only real opportunities for doing good." Gregory S. Jay, author of American Literature and the Culture Wars

"As Richard Miller clearly recognizes, there was never a time when educational systems weren't perceived as 'in crisis' and desperately in need of profound redirection. His book is about how and why in some situations and in specific discernible ways educational practices have been changed, sometimes for the better. The examples of diverse programs of reform--from Matthew Arnold to contemporary ethnographies of schooling--are followed by a return to generalities, making visible and usable in the present the ensemble of connections that thread across these specific historical cases." Evan Watkins, Pennsylvania State University

"This savvy analysis of how proposals for educational reform have worked in practice has illuminating things to say about how 'the student' and 'the teacher' have been constructed in the rhetoric of educational reform and with what results. Confronting directly the question of how to work as an "intellectual-bureaucrat" instead of evading it, this book may help to promote changes that other proposals foreclose." Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

Synopsis

Although the culture wars have preoccupied the nation for the past two decades, these impassioned debates about the function of education have produced few lasting institutional changes. The author of this volume shows why the system of higher education has been particularly resistant to reform. Unravelling stereotypes about conservative, liberal and radical reform efforts, Miller looks at what has actually happened when theories about education have been put into practice. What did Matthew Arnold do as a school inspector to promote the study of "the best that has been thought and said in our time"? Why did the Great Books programme fail at the University of Chicago and succeed at a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, Maryland? How did Tony Bennett and others involved in the radical work of British Cultural Studies test their students' knowledge of popular culture? How did ethnographers of schooling respond when they encountered students with apparently racist attitudes?

By raising such questions, the book seeks to focus attention on how students, teachers and administrators experience life in the academy as they negotiate the daily realities of reading lists, writing assignments, grading practices and funding crises. By juxtaposing what educators think about social change with what these same people actually do in the classroom, Miller intends to identify ways to generate locally effective reform objectives for the university as it retools for the information age.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801434831
• ISBN 13: 9780801434839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 249