Liberal Education and the Canon: Five Great Texts Speak to Contemporary Social Issues

In recent years ideological wars have been waged in higher education over the curriculum in general and the traditional literary canon in particular. The "great books" philosophy of a liberal education has come to be identified with such political conservatives as William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and the late Allan Bloom. In this book, Laura Ford offers an argument for maintaining the great books of the Western tradition as the centerpiece of a liberal education, but does so from the unusual perspective of a liberal, a feminist, and a mainstream academic administrator. She argues that to equate the great texts of the Western tradition with conservatism is to confuse the ideology of the texts themselves with the ideology of one group of recent advocates for the texts.