As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education

By Richard E. Miller

Although the culture wars have preoccupied the nation for the past two decades, these impassioned debates about the function of education have produced few lasting institutional changes. The author of this volume shows why the system of higher education has been particularly resistant to reform. Unravelling stereotypes about conservative, liberal and radical reform efforts, Miller looks at what has actually happened when theories about education have been put into practice. What did Matthew Arnold do as a school inspector to promote the study of the best that has been thought and said in our time? Why did the Great Books programme fail at the University of Chicago and succeed at a small liberal arts college in Annapolis, Maryland? How did Tony Bennett and others involved in the radical work of British Cultural Studies test their students' knowledge of popular culture? How did ethnographers of schooling respond when they encountered students with apparently racist attitudes?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801485282
• ISBN13: 9780801485282
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Educational Reform

As a new university administrator, I found that this book provided excellent historical context for my daily work, and a useful set of concepts for reconceiving administration as a kind of educational reform. By transcending the conventional idea of the academic bureaucrat as an intellectual untouchable, someone whose caste is unclean but sadly indispensable for getting rid of those tough administrative stains, AS IF LEARNING MATTERED helped me to think of my job as a local node in a larger network of reform stretching into the past and across national boundaries. In this sense, it seems to be an invaluable resource. I hope that in the future, the author will consider extending his analysis to the connection between bureaucracy and more overt forms of activism like union organizing and international labor movements.