Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America

By Donald Nathan Levine

Book Overview

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times.

He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind-disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226475549
• ISBN13: 9780226475547
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Chicago is still at it

Donald Levine, veteran of general education triumphs and tragedies at the University of Chicago, offers a poignant history and a marial-arts-informed proposal for the future. The well-known progenitors of Chicago's radical reforms in liberal arts education (John Dewey, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Richard McKeon--"The Professor" in Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_) are joined here by other heroes--Joe Schwab, Robert Redfield, William McNeil. Levine himself offers an updated form of their discipline for the new century: anyone interested in the future of high-minded higher education in this country, and particularly in rooting that education in a well-understood tradition, ought to read it.