The Death of Learning
How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It
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Narrated by:
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Richard Ferrone
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By:
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John Agresto
About this listen
The former president of St. Johns College reveals why 2,500 years of learning in the West is of inestimable value to all of us—and why its trashing is a crime of monumental proportions.
The liberal arts are dying. They are dying because most Americans don’t see the point of them. Americans don’t understand why anyone would study literature or history or the classics—or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of postcolonial states—when they can get an engineering or business degree.
Even more concerning is when they learn how “Western civilization” has become a term of reproach at so many supposedly thoughtful institutions; or how fanatical political correctness works hard to silence alternative viewpoints; or, more generally, how liberal studies have become scattered, narrow, and small. In this atmosphere, it’s hard to convince parents or their progeny that a liberal education is all that wonderful or that it’s even worthy of respect.
Over sixty years ago, we were introduced to the idea of “the two cultures” in higher education— that is, the growing rift in the academy between the humanities and the sciences, a rift wherein neither side understood the other, spoke to the other, or cared for the other. But this divide in the academy, real as it may be, is nothing compared to another great divide—the rift today between our common American culture and the culture of the academy itself.
So, how can we rebuild the notion that a liberal education is truly of value, both to our students and to the nation? Our highest hopes may be not to “restore” the liberal arts to what they looked like fifty or a hundred years ago but to ask ourselves what a true contemporary American liberal education at its best might look like.
Remedying this situation will involve knowing clearly where we wish to go and then understanding how we might get there. For those objectives, this book is meant to be the beginning.
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The Age of American Unreason
- By: Susan Jacoby
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".
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Interesting, but explanation by redescription
- By T. Andrew Poehlman on 07-15-08
By: Susan Jacoby
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The Tyranny of Clichés
- How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Jonah Goldberg
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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According to Goldberg, if the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves they’re not ideological. Today “objective” journalists and academics and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun aphorisms.
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I enjoyed it...and I'm a Democrat!!
- By Private. on 05-14-12
By: Jonah Goldberg
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The Voice of Reason
- Essays in Objectivist Thought
- By: Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.
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Explains Everything Of Today
- By L. Nicholson on 11-20-15
By: Ayn Rand, and others
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The Mis-Education of the Negro
- By: Carter Goodwin Woodson
- Narrated by: Carter Goodwin Woodson
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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"The Mis-Education of the Negro" is a book originally published in 1933 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The thesis of Dr. Woodson's book is that blacks of his day were being culturally indoctrinated, rather than taught, in American schools. This conditioning, he claims, causes blacks to become dependent and to seek out inferior places in the greater society of which they are a part. He challenges his readers to become autodidacts and to "do for themselves", regardless of what they were taught.
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Good Book- Horribly Narrated
- By FreeSpirit_37 on 02-13-18
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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The War on the West
- By: Douglas Murray
- Narrated by: Douglas Murray
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?
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Every Human (seriously, everyone) Read This!
- By aaron on 04-27-22
By: Douglas Murray
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The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
- The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief
- By: George M. Marsden
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular liberalelites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course.
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Such a relevant book to our current world
- By Adam Shields on 09-14-16
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Atheism for Dummies
- By: Dale McGowan PhD
- Narrated by: Paul Mantell
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Atheism For Dummies offers a brief history of atheist philosophy and its evolution, explores it as a historical and cultural movement, covers important historical writings on the subject, and discusses the nature of ethics and morality in the absence of religion. A simple, yet intelligent exploration of an often misunderstood philosophy.
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Great topic...irritating narrator
- By Duke Playbent on 10-26-14
By: Dale McGowan PhD
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The Lies That Bind
- Rethinking Identity
- By: Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Narrated by: Kwame Anthony Appiah
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.
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Not full of SJW nonsense
- By Frank on 10-22-18
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In Defense of History
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.
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Enlightening
- By David A on 07-03-18
By: Richard J. Evans
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Finding Truth
- 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes
- By: Nancy Pearcey
- Narrated by: Pamela Klein
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Don't think, just believe?That's the mantra in many circles today - whether the church, the classroom, the campus, or the voting booth. Nancy Pearcey, best-selling and critically acclaimed author, offers fresh tools to break free from presumed certainties and test them against reality.
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A Must Read!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-10-16
By: Nancy Pearcey
What listeners say about The Death of Learning
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Col-ster S
- 07-01-23
An understandable but repetitive complaint
This book offers some criticisms of current trends in higher education. A number of these criticisms are valid. However, as the book progresses into the second half, the author’s approach becomes repetitive and uses the same examples (the Western Civilization course controversy at Stanford is brought up three separate times). The actor who performs the reading does seem to identify with the material and embody the author’s voice well, but again, as the book progresses it becomes something of a one-note attitude of complaining.
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