Peter Levine

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July 22, 2010

scrambling the ideological spectrum

Here is a quote from a text that we assigned for today's session of the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies:

The first [kind of knowledge] is what may be acquired through intelligence, through the book or classroom, and skill in ratiocination. It is large in rules, prescriptions, and generalizations. The second is strictly limited to experience, to the doing of something, and to the making of what is learned an inalienable part of one's very mind and personality.

Especially if you were told that the writer prefers the second kind of knowledge to the first (as he does), you might presume that he was a "progressive" educator, a Deweyan who promotes experiential education, service-learning, and constructivism as opposed to learning from the "book or classroom." But this is a passage from Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (p. 32). Nisbet offers a full-throated defense of conservatism, arguing for authority and property as the two basic conservative values. In his opposition to abstract, theoretical knowledge and his celebration of experiential, emotional learning, he stands rather surprisingly with Dewey.

July 22, 2010 1:07 PM | category: none

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