• http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=3470

We've all learned the hard way about the trouble with technology for technology's sake. But what about the fate of learning for learning's sake?  Boria Sax's recently published Learning the Love of Learning: Newman's Ideal Updated  looks squarely at the tradition of learning for learning's sake, and finds reason to not abandon this seemingly quaint ideological position. As part of Liberal Arts On-Line, a series from the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College that looks at various--and at times competing--issues and ideas surrounding what people mean when they say 'liberal education' or 'liberal learning,' Sax's essay provides a quick romp through 2,000 years of educational history, defending the oft-attacked irrelevance of arcane scholarly pursuit from both the pragmatists who want to see what it can do to improve the world beyond the Ivory Tower, and the deconstructionists, who see worrisome dragons within the idealist claims that knowledge is an end in itself. What I had hoped for (given Sax's authority in the world of on-line learning) was both a critique of how technology might be excacerbating the problems caused by disciplinary super-specialization, and also how it might help to re-build what he calls 'the village square' function in cyberspace.