ABSTRACT
“Needed: A New Paradigm for Liberal Education” was written for the 1981 Yearbook of The National Society for the Study of Education. In the spirit of the volume’s title, Philosophy and Education, the editor, Jonas Soltis, structured the book so that each chapter would discuss a different “subarea” of philosophy—logic, metaphysics, ethics, and the like. Authors would then be expected to show how their chapter’s area illuminated an educationally important topic. As a member of the Yearbook’s editorial committee, I took part in long conference calls in which the problem of what to do about teaching and curriculum was debated. Would we wait and see if an author chose to illuminate these topics or were they too educationally important to be left to chance? When it was finally decided that they deserved chapters in their own right, I jumped at the opportunity to write one of the two chapters in the volume that fell outside its main scheme.
As a footnote to this essay, I should report that I have it on good authority—that of Paul Hirst, himself—that he no longer holds the theory of liberal education discussed herein.
