Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education [Paperback]

Gerald Graff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1993

"Graff offers a highly readable and down-to-earth perspective on some of the most ballyhooed issues in higher education today. . . . By encouraging us to argue together, he may yet help us to reason together."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Higher education should by a battleground of ideas: the real problem, Gerald Graff says, is that students are not getting more out of the battle. In this lively book, Graff argues that the "culture wars" now being fought over multiculturalism and political correctness are actually a sign of the intellectual vitality of American education—but they need to be used creatively, made part of the educational process itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Decrying conservatives who claim higher education offers a choice between culture and barbarism, University of Chicago English professor Graff argues eloquently for a curriculum that includes political debates and multicultural texts. Though he brushes away charges of left-wing McCarthyism too easily, he skewers critic Dinesh D'Souza's claim that dead white males are being expelled firom required courses. Graff suggests that conservatives' only strategy to deal with conflicting views is to deny their legitimacy, and he wisely notes that the term common culture is always evolving. Using evidence from his own teaching, Graff shows how incorporating literary criticism written by the African novelist Chinua Achebe helped revise his teaching of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He suggests that the ideological conflicts that accompany the curricular problem are getting students to grapple with ideas. Observing that students often have teachers with conflicting beliefs and assumptions in different classes, Graff concludes by surveying current innovative attempts at curriculum integration; oddly, he doesn't mention his own university's Great Books program.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Graff (English, Univ. of Chicago) here addresses Allan Bloom ( The Closing of the American Mind , LJ 5/1/87), Dinesh D'Souza ( Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus , LJ 3/15/91), and other conservative critics of multiculturalism and political correctness in the schools. He believes that teaching about cultural conflicts is a sign of vitality and hope and that it contributes to the development of a common culture. He debunks what he considers to be the myth of the vanishing classics and argues that the "course fetish" and "cult of the teacher" exacerbate conflict. Graff instead touts his program for incorporating conflicting and variant ideas into the curriculum as the best insurance for a democratic society. This provocative and controversial book is an essential acquisition for balanced subject collections.
- Shirley L. Hopkinson, SLIS, San Jose State Univ., Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 17, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393311139
• ISBN-13: 978-0393311136
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #193,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

GERALD GRAFF, a Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and 2008 President of the Modern Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, and, most recently, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gerald Graff and the Future of Critical Pedagogy, March 21, 2009

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Robert Sandberg (Southern California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (Paperback)

In his early books, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs PROFESSING LITERATURE continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books -- Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) -- to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy.

In LITERATURE AGAINST ITSELF Graff analyzes the premises, conclusions, and implications of various literary theories and contemporary schools of criticism in terms of their validity and effectiveness for pedagogy and criticism. And in PROFESSING LITERATURE Graff shows how the various teaching methods and choices of texts in departments of literature from the nineteenth though the early twentieth century suggest that new methods and new canons of study-worthy texts will continue to appear. In the more recent Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), Graff foregrounds the conclusions and pedagogical injunctions proffered in his earlier books. In the decade following the publication of Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff himself decided to put the pedagogical injunctions based on his conclusions into practice, coediting, with James Phelan, two "critical controversy" textbooks: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Case Studies in Critical Controversy) and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (Case Studies in Critical Controversy). Both of these textbooks are in their second editions. In his most recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Graff continues to explore the pedagogical implications of what he discovered in researching and writing his earlier books on theory and the institutional history of literature departments.

Teaching the controversies or conflicts has ironically even been taken up by a group which eschews rational argument -- a sine qua non of Graff's critical pedagogy: religious fundamentalists. I would agree to a certain extent with anyone who thinks it unfortunate that some religious fundamentalists -- in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses -- have co-opted Graff's phrase "teaching the controversies." But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, however ironic or unintended, part of Graff's legacy is to have afforded educators the pedagogic means to obviate the conditions in which thoughts of intellectual, political, or outright physical violence might flourish. So, by all means, let the fundamentalists, in good faith (interesting word!) teach the controversies -- but in their religious schools not in public classrooms. Let the conflicts continue to be taught and discussed by everyone -- rational free-thinkers and fundamentalists alike.

Let the controversies and the conversations they engender continue.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An Unnecessary War, October 13, 2007

By 

Martin Asiner "Adjunct College Instructor" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (Paperback)

When Jacques Derrida announced to what he saw as a patriarchal Western-based hegemony that the very basis of a two millennia tradition of belief in the essential goodness and regularity of the human soul was a fiction, it did not take long for the ripples to filter down into America's schools. The culprit that Derrida saw was nothing less than the Western illusion that paradox, ambiguity, and conflict lay subtly simmering within the pages of every text that seemingly attested to that illusion. In BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS, Gerald Graff writes of an American university pedagogy that has ossified into a hide-bound and rigid monolith that the majority of its students now reject as useless, pointless, and irrelevant. The solution, Graff suggests, is to admit that the entire educational system is severely dysfunctional, and the only way to make it functional is to apply Derrida's post-structural strategy of identifying these conflicts and teaching them as a means to make education once again both relevant and interesting. I agree that teaching conflict ought to be integral to any serious attempt to make education relevant. But when Graff identifies that only the teaching of conflict can do this, he is not only dead wrong but he misdirects the efforts of those who do see the need to incorporate the teaching of conflict as the only solution.

The flaw in Graff's basic assumption is one that he makes, in one form or another throughout his book, is to posit two extremes, one of which is the problem and the other the solution. What gets left out is the vast range of potential approaches that might work if he would admit of their existence. His starting premise is that education needs the jump start of the teaching of conflict to re-ignite what he sees as a moribund relevancy. His solution is to turn conflict into community by the team teaching of integrated disciplines such that the buried conflict within can then be exposed to scrutiny. The problem that I have with that is that there is more than one cause of educational stagnation. The lack of aggressive conflict in the classroom is but one of several potential candidates. Further, Graff assumes that the "Great Books" approach to literature, which admittedly seeks to extol and transfer universal standards of humanitarian thought and accepted wisdom is lacking any such conflict. For those who are familiar with HAMLET or PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, such readers are well aware that these and other works of the Western canon are not only replete with universal standards of wit, charm, and character but also with conflict sufficient to guarantee several centuries of ongoing reader involvement. When Graff admits to being bored with simply reading these greats, one must wonder why he seeks the conflict which the rest of us know is there in aplenty. I suspect that Graff is caught up in the general hoopla that is associated with an ideology that can be summed up thusly: "Hey hey ho ho Western Civ has got to go." Western civilization is not going anywhere as there is sufficient conflict in it to guarantee the continual involvement of the next generation of students--even if Gerald Graff is not one of them.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Myth and Muddle, October 8, 2009

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Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (Hardcover)

If anything, the public battle over what constitutes a necessary academic curriculum is more public, and more bitter, than it was when Graff wrote this book in 1992. Acrimonious name-calling and slurs are the order of the day. But Graff posits that, rather than long for a storybook consensus on what America's colleges ought to teach, we should teach the conflict that drives the debate. And he doesn't just suggest it, he shows how some schools already do it.

Graff dismantles the myth that America's colleges and universities once were pleasant havens of humanistic agreement. Bitter divides have been the order of the day since at least the 1860s, he says, and the conflicts that tear apart the academic canon today are only echoes of more than a century of debate over what constitutes knowledge. If we are to bridge that gap now, we must abandon the belief that things used to be simple and free of politics or conflict.

Instead of pining for a muddled vision of an apolitical past, or browbeating each other into a utopian future, we should make the differences in our views the centerpiece of the discussion, Graff says. Students will care a lot more, and learn a lot faster, if they can see the debates that surround their subjects. Teachers will learn more, and produce more relevant research, if they understand the intellectual climate of their topics outside their narrow fields.

Graff spends a lot of time addressing the dispute over teaching the canon in the late Twentieth Century. He may get tarred with the epithet "liberal" for his heavy focus on conservative critics. He points out William Bennett and Lynne Cheney by name, repeatedly, but doesn't hammer leftists with the same vigor. But in fact he's very conservative in his belief in the liberating mobility education ought to provide for college and university students.

Graff's list of suggestions leaves something to be desired. He is so intensely focused on urban universities that, in naming successful intercurricular programs, he leaves off smaller flourishing schools. St. John's College of Annapolis and Santa Fe has had a cross-disciplinary program since the 1930s, and Thomas Aquinas College of Santa Paula, California, has had one since the 1970s, but neither merit mention in this book's suggested programs.

But despite this large glaring omission, most of this book is valuable because it takes a debate that remains in force nearly two decades later and changes its frame. It's difficult to go back to the old whining argument when Graff has shifted our focus. If more teachers, and more program heads, were to read this book, we might not only end a useless culture war, we might well find a generation of students who are ready to learn.