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Emancipation or Obligation Bill Readings argues that the University “has lost its historical raison d’être” (19). It is a creature of the modern Western nation-state, its medieval antecedents reshaped to serve as instruments for “the production of sovereign subjects”(154), for the fashioning of good citizens able to contribute effectively to the nation’s well-being. This purpose, says Readings, is no longer viable. The cathedral of learning has become a ruin: its foundations have crumbled so completely that their repair or replacement is no longer possible. Nor even desirable. We explored in the early chapters of this book a triad of competing notions about what constitutes an educational canon—canons of content, of procedure, and of egalitarian openness. In doing so, we have already encountered Readings’s critique of the historical forms of higher education, forms I associated with these three sorts of canon, forms he calls the Universities of Culture, of Reason, and of Excellence. I went on to argue that relativist canons can best be understood as versions of these three. My aim in this chapter is to consider Readings’s alternative to these failed forms, his alternative to attempting vainly to shore up a cathedral in ruins, and to relate his suggestions to the notion of a pragmatic educational canon I have been developing since chapter 6. The problem with all three approaches to education and to the canons they articulate, according to Readings, is that they are based on an “ideology of autonomy” (154). They make the University a “site of emancipation ,” a place where students learn to become independent, to think for themselves, to make their own choices. Education is seen as the process by Chapter 12 Cathedral Ruins which we are able to free ourselves from accustomed traditions, blind prejudice , and the influence of others. We learn to control our passions, to act rationally and deliberately in accord with the moral and intellectual standards that define a fully functioning adult human being. We imagine the ideal person to be self-contained, self-sufficient—autonomous. Education as emancipation means nurturing persons who aspire to what Readings calls a “utopia of self-transparency, of a society immediately present to itself,” one “in which all members communicate unrestrictedly with all of the others all of the time and without misunderstanding or delay” (190). Communities and their canonical value systems should result from “the autonomous decision of individuals to communicate with each other as subjects of a state” (181). Only by being free and adult can they enter into a rational discussion about the possibilities for mutual advancement, leading to the formation of a social covenant they will find reasonable and so can embrace knowingly, with eyes wide open. Aristotle’s polis, populated by people of excellence; Kant’s kingdom of ends; Habermas’s society of communicative rationality—all are communities sustained by and sustaining individuals who are able to understand the implications of their choices and who on that basis have agreed to cooperate. Individual autonomy is a prerequisite for genuine community. If the emancipatory University is a microcosm of the civic macrocosm, exemplifying the ideals of citizenship it seeks to inculcate, then its faculty should be clear-headed autonomous thinkers and doers, and its students, taking them as role models, should be on their way to attaining that same condition, on their way to becoming compleat persons. Professors are those who have achieved the ideal, or rather some reasonable approximation thereto. They are the ones who are cultured, the experts. The pedagogical task of the faculty is to turn their students into replicas of themselves by exposing them to the Great Books and Great Ways that are the essential content of that culture and the methodological conditions for that expertise. Anti-canonists only depart from this model by locating in students important aspects of culture and expertise, aspects the professors may well lack— thereby giving students some authority for determining what counts as the essential contents or methods to be learned, so that the aims of the courses they take need to be negotiated rather than simply inculcated. For Readings, this vision of autonomous selves means that “to have knowledge is to gain a self-sufficient monologic voice” (156–57). The task of teaching is to help students speak in their own voice, to appropriate their general cultural heritage, and to achieve a specific expertise. Their knowledge should involve fully understood interpretations, principles, conclusions, methods, theories, and data...

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