Education · Boston College
I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. With these words, Henry David Thoreau evokes a crucial formative ideal. It is not enough to sleepwalk through life. To live fully, we must cultivate wide-awakeness, a stance of attentive responsiveness to reality. And yet our schools--like strange temples devoted to monotony, conformity, and conventionality--seem almost designed to sedate. John Dewey observed that much of what we call education is "anaesthetic" and therefore actually miseducation. In this course, we will take up Dewey's challenge to explore the transformative power of aes
