Synopses & Reviews
Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Kenneth Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The fashionable belief that the university is society's handmaiden is confronted by a view of the university as an institution with an independent vitality and function. Minogue at one and the same time reminds us of the sources of admiration for university life in the medieval world, and how it rested squarely on its essential autonomy from the very social pressures that have come to defi ne the modern university.
Synopsis
Taking on the challenge of the postmodernists of politics, Minogue argues forcefully and persuasively that the current dominant philosophies of education rest upon a mistake. The Concept of a University traces many confusions imposed by political ideology to a failure to distinguish academic inquiry from other kinds of intellectual activity, such as journalism, religious proselytiing, and high quality propaganda. Minogue holds that where the university lacks a clear sense of the difference between the academic and the pragmatic, its vitality is sapped by conflicting purposes.