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[Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis]

Hannah Arendt Center presents:

Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis

Sixth Annual Fall Conference

Thursday, October 3, 2013 – Friday, October 4, 2013
Olin Hall
10:00 am – 6:30 pm

  • Overview
  • Program
  • Speakers
  • Video

Program

Thursday, October 3, 2013

10:00 AM       Is There a Crisis of Educated Citizenship?

                      Michele Dominy

                      Roger Berkowitz

10:30 AM       Do We Need a Common Public Language?

                      Richard Rodriguez

                      Moderator: Marina Van Zuylen

11:45 AM       Has Higher Education in the United States Lost its Way?

                      Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

                      Harry Lewis

                      Moderator: Karen Sullivan

1:00 PM         Lunch

2:00 PM         Will MOOC's Save Higher Education?

                      Andrew Ng

                      Moderator: Thomas Wild and Maria Sachiko Cecire

2:45 PM         Is Education in Crisis?

                      Jerome Kohn

                      John Seery

                      Moderator: Jessica Restaino

4:00 PM         Break

4:15 PM         What is the Role of the Practical Arts in Educating Citizens?

                      Matthew Crawford

                      Moderator: Paul Marienthal

5:15 PM         How Can Civic Education Avoid Being Propaganda?

                      Elizabeth Beaumont

                      Erik Reece

                      Moderator:  David Nelson

6:30 PM         Can Education Reform Really Work?

                     
Sy Fliegel

                      Moderator: Wyatt Mason

 

Friday, October 4, 2013

10:00 AM       What Does it Mean to Educate Citizens?

                      Leon Botstein

                      Wyatt Mason

11:15 AM       Is College Necessary?

                      Dale Stephens

                      Moderator: Dean Hachamovitch

12:00 PM       Should Education Be Privatized?

                      James Tooley

                      Moderator: Ben Slivka

12:45 PM       Do the Arts Contribute to Citizen Engagement?

                      Shirley Brice Heath

                      Moderator: Nancy Leonard

1:30 PM         Lunch

2:30 PM         Are Public Schools Necessary in a Democracy?

                      Will Richardson

                      Steven Tatum

                      Moderator: Clara Haskell Botstein

3:15 PM         How Can We Expand the Education of Citizens to a Wider Public?

                      Tabetha Ewing

                      Simone Brody

                      Andrew Baruch Watchel

                      Moderator: Jonathan Becker

5:00 PM         Is a College Education Important for Being a Good Citizen?

                      Danielle Allen

                      Moderator: Max Kenner

7:30 PM         Nilaja Sun, Performance of No Child


Speakers

Keynote Speakers

  • Danielle Allen - UPS Foundation Professor at the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study and author of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, Why Plato Wrote, and Why the Declaration of Independence Matters amongst other books. 
  • Leon Botstein - President, Bard College since 1975. Chairman, Central European University. Board member Open Society Foundations. Music Director, American Symphony Orchestra 1992 to present. Artistic director, Summerscape and Bard Music Festivals. Music Director, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (2003 to 2010).  Author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture.
  • Matthew Crawford - Author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, Senior Research Fellow, University of Virginia, Contributing Editor at The New Atlantis.
  • Richard Rodriguez - Writer and Author of  Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America, among other books and essays. 

Featured Speakers

  • Elizabeth Beaumont -  Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Co-Author of Educating for Democracy and Educating Citizens and the author of the forthcoming book The Civic Constitution.
  • Jonathan Becker - Vice President and Dean for International Affairs and Civic Engagement; Associate Professor of Political Studies; Director, Globalization and International Studies at Bard College.
  • Roger Berkowitz - Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College; Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. Author of Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics.
  • Clara Haskell Botstein - Bard College's Director of Early College Strategy; in that role, she helps to strengthen and expand Bard's network of early colleges. Clara has a background in advocacy and policy research and holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree from Princeton University.
  • Maria Sachiko Cecire is Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of Experimental Humanities at Bard College. Her teaching and research interests include media studies, children's culture, medieval literature and its reception, and cultural studies. She is also a filmmaker, and her most recent work includes online documentaries that restage medieval drama for contemporary audiences. She received her doctorate in 2011 from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
  • Simone D'Souza - Executive director of the Office of Research, Accountability and Data in the New York City Department of Education. There, she manages work related to New York City's Progress Report and School Survey and the use of accountability and performance data at the Department of Education. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science, philosophy, and economics and master's degrees in education and business administration from the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Michèle Dominy - Vice President and Dean of Bard College; Professor of Anthropology and Author of Calling the Station Home: Place and Identity in New Zealand's High Country
  • Tabetha Ewing - Dean of Studies, Bard High School Early College Manhattan; Associate Professor of History, Bard College
  • Sy Fliegel - President and Gilder Senior Fellow at Center for Educational Innovation – Public Education Association, a NYC non-profit that offers alternatives to traditional schools. A former teacher, assistant principal, and Deputy Superintendant, he is recipient of the Brooke Russell Astor Award from the New York Public Library.
  • Dean Hachamovitch - Corporate vice president in charge of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.
  • Shirley Brice Heath -Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature, Emerita and Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, Emerita Stanford University. She is author of Words at work and play: Three decades in family and community life and the classic Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms.
  • Max Kenner - Founder and Executive Director of the Bard Prison Initiative. He also serves as Vice President for Institutional Initiatives and Advisor to the President on Public Policy & College Affairs at Bard College. Kenner holds a B.A. from Bard College, where he studied American History.
  • Jerome Kohn - Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust, editor of Arendt's unpublished and uncollected writings: The Promise of Politics, Essays on Understanding 1930-1954, Responsibility and Judgment and The Jewish Writings (with Ron Feldman)
  • Ellen Condliffe Lagemann - Levy Institute Research Professor at Bard College, a Senior Scholar at the Levy Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. She is author of  An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research and co-author of What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education.  Former Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
  • Nancy Leonard - Professor of English, director of graduate studies in Literature and director of the Theology program
    at Bard College. Her scholarly interests focus on Continental philosophy, cultural and political theory, and English literature,
    especially Shakespeare
  • Harry Lewis - Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science at Harvard University, Author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? He is the former Dean of Harvard College.
  • Paul Marienthal - Dean of Social Action and Director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program at Bard College.
  • Wyatt Mason- Senior Fellow, Hannah Arendt Center, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. His writing also appears in The New York Review of Books, GQ, and The New Yorker.
  • David Nelson - Rabbi; Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Bard College
  • Andrew Ng - Professor Computer Science at Stanford University, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, Co-founder of Coursera
  • Erik Reece - Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia . Contributor to the forthcoming collection, Leave No Child Inside
  • Jessica Restaino - Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at Montclair State University.
  • Will Richardson -Blogger at willrichardson.com and author of the TED book Why School? How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere.
  • John Seery - George Irving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and Professor of Politics at Pomona College, author of America Goes to College and  Too Young to Run? A Proposal for an Age Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
  • Ben Slivka installed the first LAN at Microsoft, created Internet Explorer, predicted the rise of the Web, raised three children, traveled to Japan, India, Germany, Dubai and Doha  was recently a seventh-grader-for-a-day in Harlem and Zürich, and has served as a trustee of Northwestern University since 1998.
  • Dale Stephens - is an American entrepreneur and author and one of the original 24 recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. He is the founder of UnCollege and the author Hacking Your Education.
  • Karen Sullivan - Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Cultures and Literature; Director, Medieval Studies at Bard College.
  • Nilaja Sun - Actress, Playwright, and Teaching Artist. Her Obie award winning solo piece "No Child..." will be performed at the Conference. In addition to the Obie, "No Child..."won a Lucille Lortel Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards including the John Gassner Playwriting Award for Outstanding New American Play, a Theatre World Award, the Helen Hayes Award, two NAACP Theatre Awards, and was named the Best One-Person Show at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen.
  • Steven Tatum is graduate of Bard College and Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He is currently a high school English teacher at Lake Region Union High School in Orleans, VT.
  • James Tooley - James Tooley is professor of education policy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he directs the E. G. West Centre. He is currently chairman of education companies in Ghana (Omega Schools Franchise Ltd) and India (Empathy Learning Systems Pvt Ltd) creating low cost chains of low cost private schools.He is the author of The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves for which he won the Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Prize.
  • Marina van Zuylen - Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Director, French Studies Program at Bard College
  • Andrew Baruch Wachtel -President of the American University of Central Asia and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia amongst other books.
  • Thomas Wild - Assistant Professor of German at Bard College, Hannah Arendt Center Research Associate. Among his publications are a monograph on Arendt's relationships with key postwar German writers; an intellectual biography of Arendt; and a edition of poetry by Thomas Brasch. He coedited Arendt's conversations and correspondence with the eminent German historian and political essayist Joachim Fest.

Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUpdkuMnEXA&list=PLYW5qHLZjOWFqUT8RrvF9oo4J6XzYXt2r
This event occurred on: 

“Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis” asks how we can re-invigorate the cultural and educational institutions that have nurtured public-spiritedness that is the bedrock virtue of American constitutional democracy. In an increasingly global world, do we need a common public language? Is college education necessary for engaged citizenship? Should politically involved citizens have knowledge of the arts and practical skills like building and fixing things? What, in the 21st century, is an educated citizen?


At a time of blistering technological and cultural change, reformers want schools to prepare students for the future—but which future? And despite the polarizing polemics over curricular change and the learned arguments mounted by the most earnest reformers whatever their politics, we must admit that we have no idea where our increasingly virtual reality will take us next month, let alone in a decade. Which skills and knowledge will be needed? What brain enhancements will be available? Handwringing in the public square over whether children should still be taught cursive is much ado about nothing when, if futurists are correct, we soon may no longer need to learn how to die.

If we can no longer count on the ways of the past to guide us in a brave—or terrifying—new world, education must evolve with it. As such, thinking people must ask themselves how that evolution should be handled, considered, and undertaken.

In “The Crisis in Education," Hannah Arendt writes: "education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated.” Arendt worried that when politicians talk about educating voters, they are really seeking unanimity. Political education sounds like indoctrination, which threatens the plurality of opinion at the core of intellectual life and the politics that protects it.

Against politics in its basest form, Arendt saw education as “the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” The educator must love the world and believe in it if he is to introduce young people to a world worthy of respect. In this sense, education is conservative—it conserves the world as it has been given. But education is also revolutionary, insofar as teachers must realize that the young people they nurture are newcomers whose fate is to change the world. Arendt argued that teachers must humbly teach what is; in this way they prepare students to transform what is into what might be.

Arendt shares Ralph Waldo Emerson's view that “He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society.” Emerson’s imperative of self-reliance resonates with Arendt’s imperative to think for oneself. Education, Arendt insists, must risk allowing people their unique and even unpopular viewpoints, eschewing even well-intentioned conformism and seeking, instead, to nurture independent minds. Education prepares the youth for politics by bringing them into a common world as courageous, independent, and unique individuals.

In the early years of our republican experiment, the American yeoman farmer participated in Town Hall meetings. Today, few of us have the experience or the desire to govern. Are we suffering an institutional failure to make clear to graduates that participation in governance is a personal responsibility? Or is our withdrawal from politics the conscious result of modern individualism now liberated from the demands of politics by a virtual technological reality? Whatever the cause, elites imagine that the common people are no longer qualified for self-government; and the people increasingly distrust the educated elite that has consistently failed to deliver the dream of a well-managed technocratic welfare state.

In the most literate and technologically advanced society in all history, we have produced citizens who are politically sterile. If it’s true that we learn by doing, most Americans have little experience with politics. With the exception of serving on juries, few engage in civic service. Voting is the only public activity demanded of citizens in our democracy. It takes little effort; and still, few vote. The old ideal of the citizen democracy is in crisis.


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