Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges

ISBN-13: 9780765807212 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 336 str.

Steven Koblik; Stephen R. Graubard

Opis

There is much change underway in American higher education. New technologies are challenging the teaching practices of yesterday, distance learning is lauded, and private firms offer to certify the educational credentials that businesses and others will deem satisfactory. In this new environment, America's liberal arts colleges propound a quite different set of values. Their continuing faith in the liberal arts--not as the nineteenth century chose to define them but as the twenty-first century will be obliged to reconsider them--is being tested.Distinctively American examines the American liberal arts college as an institution, from its role in the lives of students, to its value as a form of education. It explores the threats faced by liberal arts colleges as well as the transformative role, both positive and negative, information technology will play in their future development and survival. In the preface introducing the volume, Stephen Graubard examines the history of the American liberal arts colleges, from their early disdained reputations in comparison to European schools, to their slow rise to becoming "world-class universities."This important volume explores the triumphs and challenges of one segment of the American higher educational universe. It also addresses a larger question: What ought this country be teaching its young, the many millions who now throng its colleges and universities? Distinctively American is essential reading for all concerned with the future of higher education.

Spis treści

1: The Making of the Liberal Arts College Identity; 2: The Threats to Liberal Arts Colleges; 3: The Future Economie Challenges for the Liberal Arts Colleges; 4: How the Liberal Arts College Affects Students; 5: Affirmation and Adaptation: Values and the Elite Residential College; 6: The Currents of Democracy: The Role of Small Liberal Arts Colleges; 7: Distinctively American: The Liberal Arts College; 8: The American College as the Place for Liberal Learning; 9: Generating Ideals and Transforming Lives: A Contemporary Case for the Residential Liberal Arts College; 10: Science at Liberal Arts Colleges: A Better Education?; 11: New Approaches to Science and Mathematics Teaching at Liberal Arts Colleges; 12: “Vortex, Clouds, and Tongue”: New Problems in the Humanities?; 13: Reassessing Research: Liberal Arts Colleges and the Social Sciences; 14: At Home in Our World: The Place of International Studies in Liberal Arts Colleges; 15: Stability and Transformation: Information Technology in Liberal Arts Colleges; 16: The Liberal Arts College

O autorze

Stephen R. Graubard