Full Description
American educators have consistently splintered our humanity into pieces throughout higher education's history. Although key leaders of America's colonial colleges shared a common functional understanding of humans as made in God's image with a robust but vulnerable moral conscience, latter moral philosophers did not build upon that foundation. Instead, they turned to shards of our identity to help students find their moral bearings. They sought to create ladies and gentlemen, honorable students, and finally, good professionals. As a result, fragmentation ensued as university leaders pitted these identity fragments against each other inciting a war of attrition.
As the war of identities raged, its effects spilled out beyond the bounds of the curriculum into the co-curricular dimension that struggled with moving beyond being en loco parentis. The major identity they cultivated was that of being a political citizen. Thus, the major identity and story of students' lives became the American political story of democracy—what I call Meta-Democracy. In higher education guided by Meta-Democracy, students lose their autonomy to administrators who reduce the student identities they try to develop along with the range of virtues that comprise the good life. The Dismantling of Moral Education: How Higher Education Reduced the Human Identity explains why and how we arrived at diminishing ourselves.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Discarding Christian Metaphysics and Its Consequences
Chapter 1. Christian vs. Aristotelian Ethics (1569 to 1765)
Chapter 2. The Rise and Fall of America's Collegiate Conscience: Learning to Ignore the Identity War inside Us (1596-Present)
Chapter 3. How Virtue Lost Its Humanity: The Fragmentation of the Human Function (1768-1980)
Part II. The Moral Retreat to Identity Fragments
Chapter 4. The Death of Ladies and Gentlemen (1673-Present)
Chapter 5. The End of Honor: The Thin Attempts to Support Academic Honesty (1842-Present)
Chapter 6. The Professionalization of Ethics: The Faculty Retreat from Extra-Professional Moral Education (1892-Present)
Part III. The Co-Curricular Takeover and the Rise of Meta-Democracy
Chapter 7. Administrators Take Back Moral Control of the Co-Curricular: Reasserting In Loco Parentis (1890-1961)
Chapter 8. Developing Autonomous Choosers for Democracy: The Political and Psychological Turn in Co-Curricular Moral Education (1949-Present)
Chapter 9. Real Life under Totalitarians: The Meta-Democratic Effort to Control Students' Civil Society (1980-Present)
Chapter 10. How to Undermine Social Justice: Reductionistic Moral Education (1970s to Present)
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
