My Review
I became familiar with Stanley Fish through his column in the New York Times. I’ve always enjoyed his writing, and I usually agree with his positions on education; but I’ve never looked any further.
I actually decided to pick up Save the World on Your Own Time because of an off-hand remark in Dockery’s Renewing Minds pertaining to Fish’s literary views. Unsurprisingly, in this book Fish disagrees with a great many of Dockery’s ideas of what higher education should be meant to accomplish, and argues in a much more succinct, logical, and persuasive way.
The Purpose of Higher Education
Dockery, along with many of my professors, believes that the university should be a place dedicated to training men and women of character in a great many things beyond academics. Fish, on the other hand, believes that the only thing the university can reasonably expect to accomplish is the one thing it is actually designed to do: transmit knowledge and skills to its students
This immediately separates him from many, if not most, of the theories commonly encountered today. In defense of Dockery and other Christian administrators, they are seeking what is sometimes called “education that is Christian”; one of my professors prefers to distinguish “the university” from “Christian education”. The latter is thought to have a far broader task.
In general, though, after 90 years of reform-minded Ed school graduates pouring into the system, dreaming romantically of “fostering growth” and “encouraging creativity”, we still seem to be completely nonplussed when it comes to defining the purpose of schooling or education. That, or we speak on and on, assigning to the schools every duty from making sure graduates are “productive members of society”, to “fostering tolerance and understanding”, but never getting to an actual purpose. In Philosophy & Education, George Knight referred to this as “mindlessness.” We seem not to know what particular good things to pursue, so we pursue them all, without focus.
