Race, Rhetoric, and the Contest over Civic Education

It is one of the more revealing paradoxes in contemporary liberal arts education that recent cutting-edge discourses proffered in the service of democratic renewal—discourses frequently excoriated as trendy, postmodern, or ultra-radical by academics and the popular press alike—share many of the assumptions of some of the oldest theoretical justifications for higher education in America. Three such recent contributions—Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of …