Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America

ISBN-13: 9780226475530 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Publication date: 11/15/2006 Edition description: 2nd ed. Pages: 256 Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous s