(Download) "Scholars Who Teach" by Steve M. Cahn " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Scholars Who Teach
- Author : Steve M. Cahn
- Release Date : January 01, 1978
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 1699 KB
Description
RUSSELL H. BOSTERT
RUSSELL H. BOSTERT (Ph.D., Yale University) is Stanfield Professor and chairman of the history department at Williams College. He also has taught at Tufts University and, in the John Hay Program, at Bennington College and the University of Oregon. During the academic year 1976–77 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in Taiwan, associated with Fu Jen University and Tamkang College. He is the author of American Foreign Policy to 1880 and has contributed to various periodicals, including the Journal of American History, Yale Review, Hispanic-American Historical Review, and Berkshire Review.
During the decade of the 1970s the challenge for college teachers of history has been one of growing intensity. Students, educators, even historians, increasingly express doubts about the value of the subject. A few years ago many undergraduates demanded that their courses relate to social problems of the present; now they seem increasingly to perceive higher education as preparation for a career. Neither emphasis seems likely to revive the study of history in college classrooms.
Some educators believe that only branches of history remote in time and alien in content, like medieval studies, will feel the long-run effects. But in fact the current emphasis has led to skepticism about the value of any part of the past, including our own national history. What does our urban-industrial society, for example, have to learn from that long stretch of its history when the economy was chiefly agricultural and social patterns predominantly rural? What useful meaning is there for Americans now plagued by problems of over-concentrated population, polluted environments, and sick cities, in a previous social experience characterized by European immigrants moving into a virgin wilderness or helping to settle new and dynamic cities? Summing up a pessimistic response to those who demand relevance in their education, one well-known historian, Martin Duberman, wishes that “we [historians] could find a way of making the past yield information of vital concern to contemporary needs,” but he has “little hope that we can.”