Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education

by Gerald Graff

Book Overview

Is the academic warfare over multi-culturalism and political correctness really a sign of America's intellectual decline, as critics such as Allan Bllom and Dinesh D'Souza have suggested? Or is it in fact a welcome sign of vitality, an assertion of the desire for American cultural citizenship by women, blacks, and other groups previously excluded from the mainstream?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393034240
• ISBN13: 9780393034240
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Myth and Muddle

If anything, the public battle over what constitutes a necessary academic curriculum is more public, and more bitter, than it was when Graff wrote this book in 1992. Acrimonious name-calling and slurs are the order of the day. But Graff posits that, rather than long for a storybook consensus on what America's colleges ought to teach, we should teach the conflict that drives the debate. And he doesn't just suggest it, he shows how some schools already do it. Graff dismantles the myth that America's colleges and universities once were pleasant havens of humanistic agreement. Bitter divides have been the order of the day since at least the 1860s, he says, and the conflicts that tear apart the academic canon today are only echoes of more than a century of debate over what constitutes knowledge. If we are to bridge that gap now, we must abandon the belief that things used to be simple and free of politics or conflict. Instead of pining for a muddled vision of an apolitical past, or browbeating each other into a utopian future, we should make the differences in our views the centerpiece of the discussion, Graff says. Students will care a lot more, and learn a lot faster, if they can see the debates that surround their subjects. Teachers will learn more, and produce more relevant research, if they understand the intellectual climate of their topics outside their narrow fields. Graff spends a lot of time addressing the dispute over teaching the canon in the late Twentieth Century. He may get tarred with the epithet "liberal" for his heavy focus on conservative critics. He points out William Bennett and Lynne Cheney by name, repeatedly, but doesn't hammer leftists with the same vigor. But in fact he's very conservative in his belief in the liberating mobility education ought to provide for college and university students. Graff's list of suggestions leaves something to be desired. He is so intensely focused on urban universities that, in naming successful intercurricular programs, he leaves off smaller flourishing schools. St. John's College of Annapolis and Santa Fe has had a cross-disciplinary program since the 1930s, and Thomas Aquinas College of Santa Paula, California, has had one since the 1970s, but neither merit mention in this book's suggested programs. But despite this large glaring omission, most of this book is valuable because it takes a debate that remains in force nearly two decades later and changes its frame. It's difficult to go back to the old whining argument when Graff has shifted our focus. If more teachers, and more program heads, were to read this book, we might not only end a useless culture war, we might well find a generation of students who are ready to learn.

Gerald Graff and the Future of Critical Pedagogy

In his early books, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs PROFESSING LITERATURE continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books -- Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) -- to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy. In LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF Graff analyzes the premises, conclusions, and implications of various literary theories and contemporary schools of criticism in terms of their validity and effectiveness for pedagogy and criticism. And in PROFESSING LITERATURE Graff shows how the various teaching methods and choices of texts in departments of literature from the nineteenth though the early twentieth century suggest that new methods and new canons of study-worthy texts will continue to appear. In the more recent Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), Graff foregrounds the conclusions and pedagogical injunctions proffered in his earlier books. In the decade following the publication of Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff himself decided to put the pedagogical injunctions based on his conclusions into practice, coediting, with James Phelan, two "critical controversy" textbooks: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Case Studies in Critical Controversy) and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (Case Studies in Critical Controversy). Both of these textbooks are in their second editions. In his most recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Graff continues to explore the pedagogical implications of what he discovered in researching and writing his earlier books on theory and the institutional history of literature departments. Teaching the controversies or conflicts has ironically even been taken up by a group which eschews rational argument -- a sine qua non of Graff's critical pedagogy: religious fundamentalists. I would agree to a certain extent with anyone who thinks it unfortunate that some religious fundamentalists -- in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school sci