The End of Education

The End of Education Synopsis

This makes a significant contribution to the ongoing and raging debates (re: Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Roger Kimball, and most recently, Dinesh D'Souza) about the crises of the humanities. Originally about issues of curriculum and pedagogy in the American academy generally and in the liberal arts specifically, these debates have since exploded into the expansive contexts of ideology, cultural politics and "realpolitik". What is quite literally at stake, says Spanos, is the politics involved in cultural production and its grounding on the master paradigm of the core and the periphery. Drawing from various discourses of contemporary theory (primarily from Heidegger and Foucault), "The End of Education" constitutes a deconstruction of the discourse and practice of the modern humanist university. Spanos uses and transforms Heidegger's critique of the centred circle of Being in metaphysical, scientific, and humanist discourses and Foucault's critique of the panoptic gaze of disciplinary society to disclose the indissoluble relays between ontology and sociopolitics and between the so-called disinterested pursuit of Truth and the ideological state apparatus. Spanos argues that both the left ("liberal") and the right ("conservative") are in complicity in appropriating emergent and different texts and social groups in such a way as to reaffirm the validity of the humanist tradition and thereby the validity of the universalist logic of the project of the Enlightenment that continues to govern our idea of politics and social transformation. He ultimately proposes a new post-humanist theory of dialogic pedagogy that accommodates the social, cultural, and historical realities of the post-modern condition. William Spanos is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the SUNY Binghamton and founding editor of "boundary2". He is the author of "Repetitions: the Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture" and coeditor of "Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature" and "The Question of Textuality: Strategies of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism".