Teaching Democracy: A Professor's Journal - Tapa dura

Brown University instructor John Minahan was trying to make sense of the upheavals caused by one of today's most hotly debated issues: what should we teach in our schools? Minahan noticed that while professors and pundits were taking sides and issuing manifestos, no one was asking the people most affected - the students. He decided to do so. This book, based on a journal he kept while giving a course on democracy and education is the result.
Minahan got his students to talk openly about such issues as political correctness, about the "Great Books," about the nature of authority in school and in society. His students discussed many of today's most prominent writers on education - B.D. Hirsch, Dinesh D'Souza, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - as well as important figures from the past - Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. Du Bois, M. Carey Thomas - who together show that the debate, though very much of the moment, is also part of our national heritage.
Teaching Democracy records what the students said in their own writings, in class discussions, and in several tense encounters when Minahan was forced to question the basis of his own authority. The results are wise, funny, heartbreaking, angry, joyful, disarmingly honest, and refreshingly free of invective. Mr. Minahan shows that, while we may have good reason to worry about our schools and our country, we have even better reason to hope.

John Minahan has taught at the Catholic University of America, Northern Virginia Community College, Brown University, and Stonehill College.