What do you think, Mr. Ramirez?
Subtitle: the American Revolution in education
By: Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
ISBN-13: 9780226480787; 9780226480817
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Higher Education; English literature; Education; Study and teaching (Higher); Humanistic Education; Philosophy; History
Description: "Geoffrey Galt Harpham met a Cuban immigrant on a college campus, who told of arriving, penniless and undocumented, in the 1960s and eventually earning a GED and making his way to a community college. In a literature course one day, the professor asked him, 'Mr. Ramirez, what do you think?' The question, said Ramirez, changed his life because 'it was the first time anyone had asked me that.' Realizing that his opinion had value set him on a course that led to his becoming a distinguished professor. That, says Harpham, was the midcentury promise of American education, the deep current of commitment and aspiration that undergirded the educational system that was built in the postwar years, and is under extended assault today. The United States was founded, he argues, on the idea that interpreting its foundational documents was the highest calling of opinion, and for a brief moment at midcentury, the country turned to English teachers as the people best positioned to train students to thrive as interpreters--which is to say as citizens of a democracy. Tracing the roots of that belief in the humanities through American history, Harpham builds a strong case that, even in very different contemporary circumstances, the emphasis on social and cultural knowledge that animated the midcentury university is a resource that we can, and should, draw on today." -- From the cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-219) and index.
Table of contents: title: The American revolution in education; Mr. Ramirez comes to America; Teaching the intangibles: general education in postwar America; Limitations of the whole man; Breaking the stranglehold of the present; James B. Conant, American radical --; title: t Rights of the pryvat spyrit: from dissent to interpretation -- From separation to society -- From faith to fiction -- From origin to originalism -- From eloquence to abolition -- From America to English --; title: The peculiar opportunities of English; English and wisdom; The meaning of literature; The birth of criticism from the spirit of compromise; I.A. Richards and the emergence of an American humanities; Turning science into the humanities: the New Criticism; The persistence of intention --; title: Postscript : in praise of depth.