School Information System
Newsletter Sign Up |

Subscribe to this site via RSS: | Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas

December 18, 2010

The Value of Higher Education Made Literal

Stanley Fish:

A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts.

It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But that's what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 18, 2010 1:40 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas