Description
Philip Kitcher's The Main Enterprise of the World offers a sweeping vision of the goals of education. Kitcher considers the ways in which schools and universities should advance their goals, explores the social changes required to make high-quality education available to all, and argues that these reforms are economically sustainable.Kitcher build his arguments from three broad goals of education as an institution: career development and professionalization, civic participation, and human fulfilment. He shows that shifts in the workplace provide opportunities to focus on the latter two goals, and to liberate education from supposed economic constraints. By tying education to the strengthening of both individual lives and the foundations of democracy, he offers a humanistic rethinking of what education should try to achieve.Drawing on figures like Dewey, Mill, Atkinson, and others who have written deeply on education, both in theory and in practice, Kitcher offers an extensive reconsideration of how we might change our educational institutions to respond not just to the twenty-first century economy, but to the deeper need for lifelong human flourishing. The Main Enterprise of the World renews classical Pragmatism: with one eye on the ideal, and the other on the world, it presents a picture of education appropriate for our century.
Table of Contents
ContentsList of AbbreviationsPrefaceIntroductionPart IChapter 1. OverloadChapter 2. IndividualityChapter 3. FulfillmentChapter 4. CitizensChapter 5. Moral DevelopmentChapter 6. A Role for Religion?Part IIChapter 7. The Natural SciencesChapter 8. The ArtsChapter 9. Understanding OurselvesPart IIIChapter 10. Social ChangeChapter 11. Utopia?Appendix 1Appendix 2
