Copyright © 2004 Bruce W. Hauptli
This first take-home exam is due by 9:05 P.M. on Sunday (August 15)—please e-mail your essays to me by the deadline (the answers may be in the text of the e-mail, or may be submitted as an attachment(s) to the e-mail. You are to write essays in answer to each of the following questions. You may consult your books and notes, but this is not meant as a research project, and thus you do not need to read further to answer the questions. Your work on this exam should be you own, so you should not consult further with fellow students regarding these questions.
1. Martha Nussbaum contends that our primary goal should be to produce “students who have a Socratic knowledge of their own ignorance…” [p. 147]. Later in the book she emphasizes that the goal is not only “Socratic” but “pluralistic” [cf., pp. 293-295]. Clarify her conception of the goal of liberal education.
2. Clarify what Henry Perkinson thinks about “teachers with goals” and about “students with purposes.” What does he think is wrong with these individuals, and what does he propose in place of these “wrong-headed” conceptions of education? On pp. 31-32 he maintains that teachers who pursue his critical approach “do not want to strengthen the present understandings of their students, they want to improve them”—how is this not a goal?
3. What does Spring mean by “wheels in the head,” what is wrong with such wheels, and what does he propose to do to avoid them?
4. If Robert Kimball had to choose the orientation of only one of Martha Nussbaum, Henry Perkinson, or Joel Spring which do you believe he would choose, and why?