In this review of three recent books on higher education, Alexander Sidorkin shows how the disinterested discourse that appears to be anticapitalist and anticommercial is actually a way of obtaining income from state subsidies. What links the books under review—Cary Nelson's No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, and Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education—is their critical evaluation of the corporatization and (...) commercialization of higher education. In his analysis of this common theme, Sidorkin considers discourse as a means of production, and he maintains that the semiotic fields produced by discourse may create inflationary bubbles unless they engage in innovative discursive practices. Higher education is shaped by the trend toward massification, which makes the innovative discourse essential. Sidorkin concludes that the discursive energy of proponents of higher education should be focused on solving the numerous problems that arise from the massification of higher education rather than trying to reverse the trend and return to some golden age of academia. (shrink)

These two short, influential books, which grew out of Dewey’s hands-on experience in administering the laboratory school at the University of Chicago, represent the earliest authoritative statement of his revolutionary emphasis on education as an experimental, child-centered process. In The School and Society, he declares that we must “make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated with the spirit of art, history, and science.” (...) In The Child and the Curriculum he stresses the importance of the curriculum as a means of determining the environment of the child, and allowing the teacher to guide children in asserting themselves, exercising their capacities, and fulfilling their own nature. 8 black-and-white illustrations. (shrink)

Drawing on the works of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, the author explores the roles that dialogue, laughter, and spontaneity play in the education of the whole person.