|
|
Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in Americareviewed by Frederick Rudolph - 1990 Title: Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America Author(s): Page Smith Publisher: John Wiley, New York ISBN: 0140121838, Pages: , Year: Search for book at Amazon.com Back in the late 1940s when Page Smith was in graduate school at Harvard he was surely warned against the "devil theory of history," a posture that locates historical causation in conspiracy and villains and delivers an unreal and simplified view of the past. At Harvard, he tells us, he was also warned against the teachings of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, an emigre professor of social philosophy whose Spengleresque "vistas of history" (p. xi) had greatly influenced him as a Dartmouth undergraduate. There may have been no likelihood that Smith was going to pay any attention to those warnings, but Killing the Spirit, a cynical, bitter, disillusioned attack on the American university, is surely evidence that he has thoroughly ignored them. American higher education has been subjected to hostile scrutiny before-by William James, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Irving Babbitt, and more recently by Allan Bloom and William Bennett--but what makes Smith's contribution... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
|
|
|
- Frederick Rudolph
Williams College Mark Hopkins Professor of History, Emeritus
|
|
|
|
|