Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education As If Truth Mattered

By Christopher Derrick

Book Overview

Christopher Derrick The brilliant English writer Christopher Derrick presents a disturbing indictment of today's colleges and universities and the troubled condition of liberal education. The occasion... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898708486
• ISBN13: 9780898708486
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Ignatius Pr
• Length: 151 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.0" x 0.5" x 4.8"

Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking read for debates on higher education

For anyone interested in -- and concerned about -- the current state of our colleges & universities, and willing to challenge some of our culture's received orthodoxies about education in general, this is a remarkable little book and well worth the short time to read it. Inspired by a visit to a small Catholic liberal arts college in California and its classical curriculum, Derrick offers a series of well-written, thought-provoking reflections on "Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered," as the subtitle reads. One need not agree with everything in order to enjoy it, and yet with an open enough mind you will find yourself starting to think carefully about culture, freedom, and tradition, and what the greatest good in life really is, and how education might be re-thought in order to get us there. I found myself marking certain passages and dog-earing pages again and again as I read, hoping to pull out excerpts for later talks among friends and students with whom I have often discussed these same issues. Some of his most compelling points are made in the passages which explore the truth about contemporary skepticism and relativism -- the so-called "freedom" which is actually a prison-house -- as I read I couldn't help but stop for several minutes at a time to simply sit and think about what I had just read. For Catholic readers especially, the ending chapters focusing on the religious grounding for much of the book's central ideas will be more welcome; others who do not share the writer's Catholic sensibilities will undoubtedly find some of his conclusions difficult to accept -- but a worthwhile challenge, perhaps, to engage with the claims he makes. Highly recommended.

The only blueprint?

Dr. Derrick has written a quite wonderful book. I wish we had more scholars like him, and more philosophers to think and write about the liberal arts. And one cannot but be impressed by that college in Ojai, although it appears to be a response to the spiritual upheaval caused by Vatican II without the critical distance toward that disastrous event. In the true liberal tradition Dr. Derrick should have dug deeper.And the author fails to tell us anywhere why a recrudescence of the liberal arts must be Catholic, rather than catholic. Many are happy that Dr. Derrick's college is pointing the way, but a true and lasting revalorization of the arts in the 21st century, while taking into account religious truth, must be outside the gust of denominationalism.

A Travel Guide ...

Mr. Derrick narrates his introduction to Thomas Aquinas College in California and its novel experiment of re-establishing a traditional liberal arts education. By illuminating the contrast between what education has degraded to in the West and this experiment in its restoration, Mr. Derrick provides the same excellent service found in other works on the subject, such as Allan Bloom's _The Closing of the American Mind_ and James Schall's _A Different Sort of Learning_.My only hesitation preventing me from giving this book 5 stars - and this may be an problem within the entire domain of restoring the liberal arts education, so perhaps the author is not to be blamed - is its stress on Catholic faith as a prerequisite to this sort of learning.If our polity is truly interested in restoring the intellectual basis that will revitalize and assure the continuation of a free civilization and culture, then this sort of education project must be extended past the confines of the Church.