Reviews for Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey

The average rating for Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-29 00:00:00 Scout Lee Alcuin and the rise of the Christian schools Charlemagne is perhaps the first in the world to attempt to set up a gratuitous general system of education, and it was under Alcuin's guiding light. The proclamation that enjoins this is remarkable and worth reading. Alcuin's influence is clearly apparent in its logic and argumentation. Alcuin's view on the liberal arts is in some ways the culmination of a change in attitude and disposition of Christianity toward the liberal arts. Christianity's initial stance toward pagan liberal arts is one of antagonism. By the 4th and 5th centuries, this was superseded especially by Augustine's leadership. The arts became viewed as useful and necessary to understand Scriptures. See for example On Christian Instruction, composed when Augustine was in his 72nd year and containing presumably his final judgment on the matter. "Let every good and true Christian know that truth is the truth of his LORD and Master, wheresoever it be found," he writes. His influence was so commanding that from his time onward, the Church was decisively committed to toleration and even encouragement of secular studies. Boethius may have coined the term quadrivium which were the four liberal arts that were to come after the elementary trivium as later study of sciences. Cassiodorus in On the Arts and Disciplines of Liberal Letters was influential in extending the practice of copying of manuscripts into most of the monastic orders of late Christendom. He helped to establish the tradition of learning in the monastery school life for centuries. Isidore, bishop of Seville, was the most widely informed man of his time. In his Etymologies, a kind of encyclopedia, he treats the seven liberal arts. Braulis, a contemporary, asserted that God raised Isidore up to save the world from utter 'rusticity.' A century and a half later, Alcuin admired Isidore as the lumen Hispanica. One of Bede's closest friends was Egbert, who became archbishop of York in 732 and founded the cathedral school. Alcuin was trained under him in that school. "My master Egbert often used to say to me 'it was the wisest of men who discovered the arts and it would be a great disgrace to allow them to perish in our day. But many are now so pusillanimous as not to care about knowing the reasons of the things the Creator has made. Thou knowest well how agreeable a study is arithmetic, how necessary it is for understanding the Holy Scriptures, and how pleasant is the knowledge of the heavenly bodies and their courses, and yet there are few who care to know such things, and what is worse, those who seek to study them are considered blameworthy,' Alcuin would write to Charles the Great in a letter. The author of this volume esteemed Alcuin as a man but, sometimes jarringly, he often called him "childish" in his understanding. I don't say that he was wrong as far as the life of the mind intellectually goes. He noted about Alcuin that he was very conservative to a fault in his approach to education, assiduously and practically passing on what he had received from Bede and Egbert and the cathedral school in York, but adding little. He was more of a practical educator. The author himself cautions, "Whenever, therefore, we are tempted to look with contempt at the childishness of the best men of the early Middle Ages in their attempts to humanize and Christianize the Saxon or the Franks, let the character of the material on which they were working by duly considered, and then their childishness is seen to be wisdom because they essayed to do only what could be done in the circumstances." (pg. 153) What attracts me to read more about the life and influence of Alcuin is what I read about his character and witness for the Christian gospel to Charlemagne in Robert Louis Wilken's The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity. He swiftly became Charlemagnes's most trusted adviser and more than any other person he was responsible for the educational reforms that took place during Charles's reign. But what sets him more apart like a light in a very dark place is his belief that coercion was inimical to the gospel, something which permeated his writings and letters and placed him in stark contrast with Charlemagne. He was working with very difficult material in a very barbarous time. After Charlemagne's grandfather Charles Martel had halted the advance of the Muslim invaders, with Charlemagne we can speak for the first time of a distinct political and cultural entity called Europe. Charlesmagne chose to end Saxon autonomy. He himself oversaw the mass execution of more than four thousand Saxon prisoners of war, intending to break the Saxon will for resistance. Saxons in Saxony were forced to undergo Christian baptism or face execution. Capital punishment was also prescribed for worship of the traditional gods, failing to have one's children baptized, eating meat during Lent, or cremating the dead (See History of the World Christian Movement, Vol.1, pg. 335). "With the baptism of the Saxons, we see the first full-scale use of military force and violence to compel a people to convert to Christianity. Roman law had increasingly hardened over the course of several centuries of Christian religious dominance to proscribe heresy, restrict the rights of Jews and other religions, and favor the institutional advancement of Catholic churches…Charlemagne set a precedent, one that Christian rulers all too often came to follow" (Ibid. pg. 336). Alcuin wrote, "faith arises from the will, not from compulsion. You can persuade a man to believe, but you cannot force him. You may even be able to force him to be baptized, but this will not instill the faith in him." A few years after the Saxon conquest, Charles was faced with another foe on the borders of his kingdom, the Avars in the Balkans. After they were subdued by the Frankish armies, it appeared they too would be subjugated by the same harsh methods used on the Saxons. However, Alcuin stepped in to protest. He wrote a letter to Arn, bishop of Salzburg, imploring him to be "a preacher of piety, not an exactor of tithes" and he wrote directly to Charlemagne, praising him for his victory and then expressing his serious doubts whether his methods of introducing Christianity among conquered peoples were pleasing to Christ. He said though Christ granted him victory over the Avars, he must now "provide devout preachers for the new people, men who are honorable in their ways, well trained in the knowledge of the holy faith, imbued with the word of God, close followers of the example of the apostles." He was in particular critical of the rapid imposition of tithes before the people had any understanding of Christianity. "Apparently his entreaties were heard. At a meeting in Bavaria, Bishop Arn, Bishop Paulinus of Aquileia, and Charlemagne's son decided not to force the Avars to submit to baptism. Only after they had been persuaded and instructed were they to be baptized. Soon afterwards Charles issued a milder capitulary for the Saxons [than the harsh one he had previously issued against them]" (Wilkens, pg. 337.) Alcuin's very gentle but firm stance against violence to me is like a beacon light in deep darkness, a witness to the true Christian gospel. I similarly revere De Las Cassas for his testimony to the Spanish royalty against the depredations of the early colonizers of South America, and Francois Fenelon for standing up to the Louis XIV the "sun king" in an anonymous letter in which he charged him with making of France a vast hospital with his greedy wars. And then of course there is all Alcuin's very great labor on behalf of education as well as peaceable Christian integrity. The first full-scale use of military force and violence to compel a people to convert to Christianity didn't occur until the ninth century with Charlemagne, and it was immediately met with the voice of Christian conscience in Alcuin. This contrasts markedly with the spread of Islam by a series of conquest and forcible conversions from the beginning. Why did this occur now? Remember that in living memory, Charlemagne's grandfather had halted the advance of the Islamic conqueror whose dazzling civilization had threatened the people's of what became Europe existentially. In an essay by Jacques Ellul entitled "The Influence of Islam", he opens by observing, "Stress has seldom been laid upon the influence of Islam on Christianity, that is, on the deformation and subversion to which God's revelation in Jesus Christ is subjected…Engaged in unlimited conquest, with a universal vocation similar to that claimed by Christianity, Islam was expanding its empire in three directions: to the south, especially along the coasts into black Africa, and reaching as far as Zanzibar by the twelfth century; to the northwest, with conquest of Spain and the invasion of France up to Lyons on the one side and Poitiers on the other; and to the northeast into Asia Minor and as far as Constantinople. With the Turks Islam would then continue incessantly to threaten the Balkans, Austria, Hungary, etc." Another French philosopher, Rene Girard, developed a theory of mimetic rivalry, observing enemies locked in battle often engage in mimetic rivalry. "What counts is what is imported into Europe. It is the fact of unwitting imitation. It is the fact of being situated on the chosen territory and being delimited by those whom one wants to combat," Ellul writes. "For three centuries Christianity spread by preaching, kindliness, example, morality, and encouragement of the poor. When the empire became Christian, war was hardly tolerated by the Christians. Even when waged by a Christian emperor, it was a dubious business and was assessed unfavorably…In Islam, on the contrary, war was always just and constituted a sacred duty. The war that was meant to convert infidels was just and legitimate, for, as Muslim thinking repeats, Islam is the only religion that conforms perfectly to nature….Prior to the eighth century Christianity hardly ever stated that revelation conforms to nature. Tradition, based on the Bible, took the contrary view. Nature is fallen, the flesh is wicked, people in themselves, in their natural state, are sinners and unbelievers…As soon as Christianity becomes a religion that conforms to nature, then it becomes necessary to force people to become Christians. In this way they will come back to their true nature. Forced conversions begin to take place. The famous story of Charlemagne forcing the Saxons to be converted on pain of death simply presents us with an imitation of what Islam had been doing for two centuries. But if war now has conversions to Christianity as its goal, we can see that very quickly it takes on the aspect of holy war. It is a way waged against unbelievers and heretics… But the idea of a holy war is a direct product of the Muslim jihad…The idea of a holy war is not of Christian origin. Emperors never advanced the idea prior to the appearance of Islam…The Crusades, which were once admired as an expression of absolute faith, and which are now the subject of accusations against the church and Christianity, are of Muslim, not Christian, origin. We find here a terrible consequence and confirmation of a vice that was eating into Christianity already, namely that of violence and the desire for power and domination. To fight against a wicked foe with the same means and arms is unavoidably to be identified with this foe. Evil means inevitably corrupt a just cause." Similar to the Muslim belief that every infant is a Muslim because Islam is in perfect conformity to nature, a formula quickly spreads that the soul is by nature Christian, which is the counterpart of the Muslim view. This view imitative of Islam unwittingly robs the unique redemptive worth of the death of Jesus Christ of its ultimate seriousness. If human nature is naturally in harmony with the will of God, what is the point of the death of Jesus Christ? Another dreadfully sad turn Christianity took was over the issue of slavery. Slavery gradually disappeared in the Roman Empire. The general thesis that there was no more slavery in Christendom is true. "Nevertheless, from the fifteenth century, with the development of knowledge of Africa, and then especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the familiar and dreadful history of the enslaving of Africans, who were torn from their own country and transported to the Americas…In the Middle Ages the traffic in slaves would undoubtedly have led to excommunication." Why then this incipience? "For centuries the Muslims had regularly cropped the black continent for slaves. Seizing Africans as slaves was a Muslim practice from at least the tenth century. The African tribes were in this case attacked by considerable armies, in veritable invasions…The Muslims carried off to the East far more black slaves than the Westerners ever did. In the eleventh century fifteen great slave markets were set up by the Arabs in black Africa. ..Slaves were the main item in Muslim trade from the tenth century to the fifteenth…In conclusion, let me make it clear that I have not been trying to excuse what the Europeans did. I have not been trying to shift the 'blame,' to say that the Muslims, not the Christians, were the guilty party. My purpose is to try to explain certain perversions in Christian conduct. I have found a model for them in Islam. Christians did not invent the holy war or the slave trade. Their great fault was to imitate Islam. Sometimes this was direct imitation by following the example of Islam. Sometimes it was inverse imitation by doing the same thing in order to combat Islam, as in the Crusades. Either way, the tragedy is that the church completely forgot the truth of the gospel. It turned Christian ethics upside down in favor of what seemed to be very obviously a much more effective mode of action, for in the twelfth century and later the Muslim world offered a dazzling example of civilization. The church forgot the authenticity of the revelation of Christ in order to launch out in pursuit of the same mirage." Alcuin sent an elaborate copy of the four Gospels to Charlemagne after his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. The middle of the 10th century marks the limit of the age of Alcuin in education. Yet, amidst the devastations and wars of the age that followed, there are indications of the continuance of the schools traceable to the influence of the preceding age. "Alcuin's work was incipient and premonitory, and the outcome was greater than his plan. But his work had first to be done before later developments were possible." pg. 178 Works I might like to follow up with are Lorenz's The Life of Alcuin and Stubbs's Alcuin, in the Dictionary of Christian Biography.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-12 00:00:00 Scott Glovier Interesting. Includes enlightening historical detail and effective teaching advice.