Index#: 07589
Will Count Towards English MAJOR
Will Count Towards English MINOR
Course description.
Does education have a role to play in creating a more just and equal society? Is the grand project of educating future citizens oriented toward change (more freedom and opportunity for more people) or, by contrast, toward continuity (ideological reproduction, preserving stability through generations)? Should we think about education in terms of meritocracy or redistribution? Even as I write this, the pandemic is reframing these questions. Is education part of the social contract? That is, is it something we owe to our fellow citizens and therefore that the government is obligated to provide? How does the total or partial closure of schools affect access to education across demographic groups? Is education essential, and is it essential for everyone? How do we as a society allocate it as a resource, and what do those choices, under the best and the worst of circumstances, show us about what kind of a society we are?
In this course, our approach to these questions will be primarily philosophical, meaning that it requires asking that oldest of questions: what is a good life? How might we balance a concern for the collective good with a consideration of individual flourishing, and how can education help strike this balance? We’ll explore these issues in two historical contexts: the American present, broadly conceived (the unfolding crisis of the pandemic set against the longstanding crisis of segregation) and the European intellectual tradition sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment, coinciding with the scientific and political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Our historical reading will focus on two figures associated with contract theory and its role in the development of representative government: John Locke, in England, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in France. Both thinkers also wrote extensively about education, which stands to reason: representative government depends for its success on the citizens who participate in it. Still, its character is defined in no small part by categories of people who are excluded from participation, and from the very idea of citizenship. Because citizenship in the eighteenth century was so narrowly defined along the lines of race, gender, and class (as, too, were the developing concepts of natural and human rights), we will think critically about the gaps between the promise and the practice of education, both then and now.
In addition to reading Locke and Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft, we will look to journalists and scholars (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Paul Tough, Anthony Jack) to shape our understanding of the present.
About Professor Zitin
Abigail Zitin studies British writers, artists, and critics of the eighteenth century; she comes to Rutgers after having taught at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her current project investigates when and how the term form became meaningful as an attribute of verbal artworks, taking as its central focus William Hogarth’s 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. Hogarth articulates a theory of aesthetic pleasure grounded in visual experience, which gives rise to the following questions: were its conclusions supposed to apply to products of the human imagination composed in language? How might literary texts have eluded the purview of a term as apparently fundamental as form? Corollary areas of interest include aesthetics and gender, both in and beyond Hogarth’s Analysis, and the cultural history of addiction as a framework for thinking about agency, psychology, and the rise of the novel.