Henry Giroux and Education

Universities are rapidly becoming trade schools, churning out graduates trained for a particular profession but with very little in the way of a general education, particularly in the liberal arts. From the time of the ancient Greeks, education was divided between skills for the mind and skills for the body, the latter being subservient to the former. Today=s universities appear to have lost this dichotomy. Several reasons for this have been put forth, the main one being the needs of a highly technological world. Many rue this loss of a more esoteric education and ponder its effects on mankind.

Giroux admits that liberal arts programs are neither ideologically neutral nor non-political. However, he realizes that as such, they are subject to change over time and that the values of liberal arts programs reflect those of the society and culture in which they exist. These will, of necessity, change over time. With changes in the ethnic makeup of America, the advent of the women=s movement, and the civil rights movement, the makeup of universities has changed, both in terms of the academic staff and the students. This has produced a need for changes in the

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y, it needs to be combined with more practical studies to prepare someone to take their place in society. A blend between a general and a more career-oriented curriculum needs to be developed. Bloom is very critical of university education today and doubts the possibility of reestablishing the idea of an educated human or the establishment of a truly liberal education again (p. 380). He believes that universities have become educational wastelands, with no direction, no philosophy, no real meaning anymore. When a student enters university, A...he finds a bewildering variety of departments and a bewildering variety of courses. And there is no official guidance, no university-wide agreement, about what he should study.@ He sees university curricula these days as being devoted to future practical careers, leaving no room for philosophical thought and mind-expanding courses. Students are at liberty to pick and choose what courses they will take, and so get a smattering of a variety of subjects, but no real in-depth education in any one of them, so no real intellectual thought is stimulated. The social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities have all succumbed to the vagaries of the course selection process, and the stud
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Approximate Word count = 2535
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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