Peter Bradley
Director of the Honors Program, Ferris State University will speak on
Education as Utopia
In his unfinished work ‘New Atlantis’, Francis Bacon imagines the wonders of ‘Saloman’s House’, an institution for wholly dedicated to attaining “the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire.” Educational theorists from Plato to Nussbaum have posited different ends of education and educational institutions, from creating a just society to human flourishing. These thinkers, like utopian authors, highlight problems in our existing society by imagining institutions free from those problems. In this paper, I hope to show that understanding the ends of education as counterfactual utopian hypotheses sheds new light on this philosophical and literary tradition.
Friday May 7, 2021
8:00 A.M.
Zoom
https://clarkson.zoom.us/j/97727900192?pwd=Ky8xeGdsb3oxQkxuanZ3a2VtYzNYUT09