Abstract

Russell Jacoby's Dogmatic Wisdom seems to imply that American education was once significantly better man today: “To reflect on liberal education today is to consider not only its demise but the reason for its demise, an illiberal society” (xviii). Similarly, “a liberal education shatters under the weight of commercialism” (xii), and there has been a “corroding” of liberal education (8). Thus he calls for an “effort to resucitate a liberal education” (14), and help it “regain its vitality” (15). Yet his analysis also makes it clear that the American educational system was never really all that liberal. Only at the very end of the book does the real complaint appear: that “the democratic promise” of education has not been fulfilled (196).