What concrete actions might a change-minded teacher take? This is the question driving How to Fix Education.
An uncanny anticipation fills the halls of American higher education today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis or only headed in that direction, many college professors, administrators, and students can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss.
In How to Fix Education, Glenn Wallis argues that consequential action can be taken immediately in the classroom to put the humanity back in "the humanities." In this succinct handbook he provides the logic and layout of an approach for instructors who want to enact larger-scale social changes with or without institutional change at the macro level.
What concrete actions might a change-minded teacher take? This is the question driving How to Fix Education.
An uncanny anticipation fills the halls of American higher education today. It is the sense that a reckoning is coming. Whether it is the case that higher education is in the teeth of a catastrophic crisis or only headed in that direction, many college professors, administrators, and students can no longer stave off their suspicion that something is seriously amiss.
In How to Fix Education, Glenn Wallis argues that consequential action can be taken immediately in the classroom to put the humanity back in "the humanities." In this succinct handbook he provides the logic and layout of an approach for instructors who want to enact larger-scale social changes with or without institutional change at the macro level.
Glenn Wallis is an independent scholar and Director of Incite Seminars in Philadelphia. He has taught at several universities, including Brown University, and the University of Georgia. His most recent books include A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real and Cruel Theory and Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism (with Tom Pepper and Matthias Steingass). Wallis blogs at Speculative Non-Buddhism. He holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University.
Wallis's book isn't (just) a book in the philosophy of education. It is a book about being human. It's a book about learning to be, and insisting on being, human in the concrete here-and-now. It's a book about bracketing out the world outside of the classroom. At least for a time. In prefiguring the world we wish to live in, we attempt to create a microcosm that reflects our values. A microcosm that allows for the expression and development of our values. As such, we practice and embody the motto "everything is in everything".In the classroom, we can practice bracketing out the world as it is now. By ignoring the "practical" life (the apparent impossibility of change) outside of the classroom, we allow ourselves to see and to reach for what is within our grasp (the possibility of change), namely our actions in the classroom.How to Fix Education is a book for (a gift to) you if you want to be an educator. It's a book for you if you care about being a good educator. I should read it again. And I should think and talk about it again. With colleagues and students. I am thankful to Glenn Wallis for writing it. For embodying and prefiguring his ideals of education in this book.--Davood Gozli
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