Abstraction and Finitude: Education, Chance and Democracy [Book Review]

Studies in Philosophy and Education 25 (1):19-35 (2006)
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Abstract

Education in the west has become a very knowing business in which students are encouraged to cultivate self-awareness and meta-cognitive skills in pursuit of a kind of perfection. The result is the evasion of contingency and of the consciousness of human finitude. The neo-liberalism that makes education a market good exacerbates this. These tendencies can be interpreted as a dimension of scepticism. This is to be dissolved partly by acknowledging that we are obscure to ourselves. Such an acknowledgement is fostered by the mythic dimension of experience, which also recommends a degree of humility to the citizens of democratic states.

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Richard Smith
Colorado State University

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.Richard Rorty - 1989 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Democracy and Education.John Dewey - 1916 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
Philosophy and social hope.Richard Rorty - 1999 - New York: Penguin Books.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.Richard Rorty - 1989 - The Personalist Forum 5 (2):149-152.

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