The Question of Conscience: Higher education and personal responsibility: 43 (Bedford Way Papers, 43) - Softcover

Watson, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782770267 ISBN 13: 9781782770268

Publisher: Institute of Education Press, 2013

Synopsis

Most of the claims about the purposes and achievements of higher education are irreducibly individualistic: it will change your life, through conversion or confirmation of faith, by improving your character, by giving you marketable 'abilities', by making you a better member of the community, or by being simply 'capable' of operating more effectively in the contemporary world. All of these qualities scale up, of course, but in differing ways. David Watson explores the question of what higher education sets out to do for students through a number of lenses, including the 'evolutionary' stages of modern university history, the sense participants and observers try to make of them, and a collection of 'purposes', or intended personal transformations. The resulting combinations are clustered, around major questions about the role of universities for their students, and in society at large. He concludes by testing claims about the role of higher education in developing varieties of personal responsibility. This book identifies and explores how varied these claims have been over the long history of the higher enterprise, but also how strong and determined they invariably are.

About this title

About the Author

David Watson is Professor of Higher Education and Principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How can higher education possibly meet all the expectations that weigh on it, to foster not just learning, but also character and generosity? Sir David Watson’s deeply thought-through book is an enormously stimulating and encouraging answer to this question. He uses his exceptionally wide knowledge and experience of many forms of post-secondary education, as well as of engagement with social problems, to review a huge range of ideas and practical experiments in this field, and to illuminate their potential. From the Foreword by Theodore Zeldin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Institute of Education Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782770267
• ISBN 13: 9781782770268
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172