Education and Its Discontents Teaching, the Humanities, and the Importance of a Liberal Education in the Age of Mass Information

Today, people are born into two universes-the real and the virtual. As the 1999 movie The Matrix brought out, people today are born twice, biologically and technologically. The implications of this paradigm shift are enormous, touching upon every aspect of human cognitive, social, and emotional life. Education in particular is changing almost daily because of this shift in human civilization. Moss's book looks at the implications in a remarkably clear yet highly insightful way. His understanding of the shift is deep and reflective. This is required reading for social scientists, educators, and anyone worried or apprehensive of how education, nay, civilization, is evolving. -- Marcel Danesi, University of Toronto Among the many studies that have investigated the crisis of the humanities and liberal education in the past two decades, none is more comprehensive, well-researched, incisive, or elegantly presented than Mark H. Moss's Education and its Discontents. One by one, Moss takes up the causes of the demise; from the enormous social and governmental demands placed upon universities and the "corporate" response to deal with them, to the massive proliferation of distracting electronic devices, to "feel good" teaching and learning that lacks rigor and accountability, Moss examines each factor, his argument gathering overwhelming momentum. Without knowledge of the principal books in the canon, argues Moss, students lack the intellectual experience that enables them to make independent judgments of merit, taste, and morality. -- John Paul Russo, author of The Future without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological