Description
American education as we know it today—guaranteed by the state to serve every child in the country—is still less than a hundred years old. It’s no wonder we haven’t agreed yet as to exactly what role education should play in our society. In these Tanner Lectures, Danielle Allen brings us much closer, examining the ideological impasse between vocational and humanistic approaches that has plagued educational discourse, offering a compelling proposal to finally resolve the dispute. Allen argues that education plays a crucial role in the cultivation of political and social equality and economic fairness, but that we have lost sight of exactly what that role is and should be. Drawing on thinkers such as John Rawls and Hannah Arendt, she sketches out a humanistic baseline that re-links education to equality, showing how doing so can help us reframe policy questions. From there, she turns to civic education, showing that we must reorient education’s trajectory toward readying students for lives as democratic citizens. Deepened by commentaries from leading thinkers Tommie Shelby, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Michael Rebell, and Quiara Alegría Hudes that touch on issues ranging from globalization to law to linguistic empowerment, this book offers a critical clarification of just how important education is to democratic life, as well as a stirring defense of the humanities.
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This book features Danielle Allen’s 2014 Tanner Lectures, delivered at Stanford University, along with comments from four distinguished contributors—Harvard philosopher Tommie Shelby; education and globalization scholar Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (UCLA); Michael Rebell, executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia; and Pulitzer-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes—along with Allen’s response to the commentaries.Why it is so hard to think about education and equality in relation to each other? Allen asks. For all of our talk about the two, we don’t actually talk much about how education itself relates to equality, regardless of whether the equality we have in mind is human, political, or social, or connected to economic fairness. The basic problem that motivates these lectures, then, is the following: Allen thinks that education itself—a practice of human development—has important contributions to make to the defense of human equality, the cultivation of political and social equality, and the emergence of fair economic orders. But she thinks we have lost sight of just how education relates to those egalitarian concerns. If we are to do right by the students we purport to educate, in whatever context and at whatever level, we need to recover that vision. Allen’s goal, therefore, is to recover our understanding of just how education and equality are intrinsically connected to each other.
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