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  • Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America
  • Elaine El-Khawas (bio)
Donald N. Levine. Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 299 pp. Cloth: $39.00. ISBN: 0-226-47553-0.

A fascinating book this is. Quite unlike most books on higher education in both style and substance, it offers two intriguing stories: First, it records "in as much complexity as space permits, the ideals and practices of an extraordinary educational venture" that promoted "excellent educational thought and practice" (p. 5) at the University of Chicago. Second, it builds on the accumulated wisdom of the Chicago experience to offer a thoughtfully developed curricular approach to liberal learning that fits the challenges of today's world.

Spurred by discomfort with Allan Bloom's 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, Professor Levine spent a decade developing this inspiring and insightful response. He drew on his career-long engagement with undergraduate learning at the University of Chicago—as professor and, for five years, as dean of the College—to offer this rich, deeply considered restatement of both the ideals and the practices of teaching for liberal learning.

Part 1 sets the stage by offering a sense of the diverse "liberalizing" purposes that shaped philosophies of education in different cultural contexts and time periods. Part 2, the most extensive section, recounts the University of Chicago's 20th-century experiments with liberal learning. Part 3 offers a synthesis and a new departure, in which Levine offers clear-thinking, helpful distinctions, an array of pertinent illustrations, and examples of courses he has designed and taught, all toward the purpose of promoting the intellectual development of students.

A significant contribution of this volume lies in its reflections on Chicago's long tradition of deep respect for liberal learning. Levine's commitment to this tradition uniquely allows him to recapture this world in Part 2, reviving the significant debates over pedagogical approaches and retrieving the arguments that promoted various requirements for undergraduate education at Chicago. The reforms [End Page 477] of many great educators—Dewey, Hutchins, McKeon, Schwab, and others—come alive, with generous footnoting, comparisons of different curricular plans and their subsequent revisions, and documentation from archival sources that Levine has obviously pored over extensively. Levine offers a chart on 18 points of convergence in the educational visions of Dewey and Hutchins, for example.

Levine argues that a special set of conditions made this commitment to undergraduate education possible: exceptional presidential leadership, supportive institutional structures, and "traditions of intense faculty concern with education" (p. 5). As an alumna of Chicago's doctoral program in sociology, I well remember his intellectually rigorous teaching style, the course in sociological inquiry he describes (p. 241) and, especially, Chicago's unusual cultural world that Professor Levine invokes—strikingly insular yet refreshingly pure in its zeal for the pursuit of sound thinking, analysis, and exposition—that was kept alive by Chicago's professoriate over many decades.

This is not a research study. It offers no data, charts, or statistics in arguing its case. The book barely affirms the necessity of evaluating whether and how pedagogical innovations are effective with students. Its coverage is, in fact, more about teaching than learning. It captures the faculty debate, recounts well-reasoned interchanges about purposes, and illustrates the diverse ways that curriculum reforms can be designed by caring, capable scholars.

That said, the book is stellar. It combines a personal account of an intellectual journey and a case history of a single university's experience in shaping its undergraduate curriculum. It gains significance because of the person and the setting. This journey engaged someone who has been passionate about nurturing intellect, and his career-long journey took place in an environment that celebrates its own commitment to educating undergraduates.

Historians of higher education as well as advocates of curriculum reform will be mesmerized by the tales told in Part 2—how certain core courses were designed and redesigned, how various deans articulated goals for undergraduate courses with differing emphases and preoccupations. Levine has a deep knowledge of this history and quotes heavily from archival sources to bring...

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