The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience

This work seeks to bring sense to a volatile subject by reminding us that controversy has always surrounded the curriculum of the modern university. It points out where and how contemporary critics of the curriculum are wrong, historically speaking, and it shows how American ideals of liberal education are extraordinarily obscure, the product of many different attitudes and historical intentions. The author suggests that we cannot begin to understand the present curricular wars without looking back over the past two centuries. The author analyzes moments in history including the battle of the books between Oxford and representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment at the turn of the 19th century and attempts to show that the fields of literature and history in liberal education have been joined by, and in a measure challenged by, the comparatively young discipline of anthropology, a moment when American higher education needs to understand better what it is trying to do.