
Curricular Review: Redefining a World-Class Education		39:41
History, Structure, and Content of American Academic Culture
	Introduction: American Academic Culture	7:13
	The Shaping of the American Curriculum	6:57
	Building an American Academic Culture	8:57
	Theories on the Contemporary Curriculum	6:41
	Conclusion: The Challenges of General Education	3:46
	Audience Question & Answer	8:05

	Conclusion: The Challenges of General Education
	In conclusion, Professor Bender offers quotes from two philosophers. The first quote comes from Alfred North Whitehead’s <i>Science and the Modern World</i> published in 1925, and the other from John Dewey’s <i>Experience and Nature</i> published in 1929. Professor Bender says the dates are important because the 1920s were the moment when the modern structure of disciplinary departments took form in American universities. This particular moment tied the intellectual power of disciplines with the financial and institutional power of departments, and this is why they are dominant today. <br> <br> States Alfred North Whitehead, "Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove, but there is no groove adequate for the comprehension of human life. Of course no one is merely a mathematician or merely a lawyer. People have lives outside of their profession or their business, but the point is the restraint of serious thought within a groove. The remainder of life is treated superficially, with the imperfect categories of thought derived from one profession. Here the challenge of general education is to find a way to deepen that knowledge, that knowledge that is inevitably and unavoidably outside of the domain of the disciplinary groove."<br> <br> For John Dewey, the quest for knowledge begins with the experience of the everyday—the issues of our common life. For him, the special contribution of scholarship to our common lives was its access to a refined and severe method of thought, informed by special knowledge. The task of the educated was to move from the common to the esoteric and back. Dewey wrote that the test of success is whether the scholar's special knowledge, "when referred back to ordinary life experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful, or does it terminate in the making of things of ordinary experience more opaque." Professor Bender thinks that kind of movement, however one were to institutionalize it in an educational system, is the task of general education in a world of disciplines.<br> <br> We must keep having these conversations because the American research university is a compound of the German research university and the English liberal arts college. That is our strength, but it is an unstable compound requiring constant attention. <br> <br>

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