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Lapham's Quarterly: Ways of Learning
Students, teachers, and the quest for knowledge fill this issue—be it in the school of hard knocks or the school of Athens.
Among the contributors: Leonardo da Vinci, Elizabeth Bishop, René Descartes, Buddha, Hellen Keller, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Plato, John Stuart Mill, Carl Jung, Jane Addams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Chaucer, Donald Barthelme.
Among the contributors: Leonardo da Vinci, Elizabeth Bishop, René Descartes, Buddha, Hellen Keller, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Plato, John Stuart Mill, Carl Jung, Jane Addams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Chaucer, Donald Barthelme.
221 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
5 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
Lewis H. Lapham
181 books134 followersLewis Henry Lapham was the editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until 1981, and again from 1983 until 2006. He is the founder and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly, featuring a wide range of famous authors devoted to a single topic in each issue. Lapham has also written numerous books on politics and current affairs.
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
Lapham's Quarterly
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 12, 2014
You can find links to my numerous Lapham’s Quarterly reviews here: http://fairplay740.wordpress.com/2014... .
SIX out of five stars!! (That’s not easy but it’s not the Math issue. Read further.)
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” –H.G. Wells 1920 (Inside front cover.) [Isn't that the truth these days. -JH]
Authors, to name a few: Jefferson, Montessori, Abigail Adams, Milton, Auden, Brecht, Orwell, Dali’, Cleaver, Aristophanes, Rousseau, Descarte, Da Vinci, Plato, Bronte, Dickens, Helen Keller, Emerson, Seneca, Nietzsche, Chaucer, Hesse, Plath, Woolf, Roosevelt (T.), Dahl, Diderot, Erasmus, Twain, Thoreau, and Boethius.
This issue sections of Voices In Time:
The Hypothesis
The Experiment
Product & Byproduct
The theme graphic this issue is The Art Of Knowing by Joyce Pendola. Its micro print charts Cartography, Writing, Autopsy, and Construction from c. 3500 BC to 2008.
Lewis Lapham’s preamble never fails to be eloquent and insightful. It is titled Playing With Fire, perhaps an allusion to the opening quote:
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” –Plutarch (p. 13)
This is the best preamble I’ve read in Lapham’s Quarterly. When L.Q. is finished formatting the new website you MUST read this in its entirety. (If you do not deign to own the entire issue of course.)
Lapham immediately rails against the declining quality of education. Who can argue with that?
He notes that Jefferson founded the Univ. of Virginia “to develop “the reasoning faculties of our youth,” … to advance “the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation.”” (p. 15)
By 1909 then Princeton Univ. president Woodrow Wilson was stating “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,” “…and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.” (p. 15) Hmm. ‘A very much larger [less educated] class….’ [How nice. -JH]
Lewis: “The framework of American education set up at the outset of the twentieth century has proved itself well-fitted to the specifications of the national security state that at the end of World War II replaced what was once a democratic republic.” (p. 16) Cutting, Mr. Lapham. Cutting.
“Students don’t go to school to acquire the wisdom of Solomon. They go to school to acquire a cash value and improve their lot, to pick up the keys to the kingdom stocked with the treasure to be found in a BMW showroom or Arizona golf resort.” (p. 16)
“Under the rules of egalitarian procedure, the schools must teach everything to everybody (algebra and the novels of Jane Austen as well as the manipulation of the iPhone and the condom). …Even more wonderful, they must entertain the fiction that everybody can learn to write as well as Jefferson or to think as clearly as Rene’ Descartes.” (p. 16)
“The tide of mediocrity flows into the classroom from the ocean that is the society at large, …the students headed into overcrowded classrooms where they major in the art of boredom and the science of diminished expectations…” (p. 18)
“Why would any politician in his or her right mind wish to confront an informed citizenry capable of breaking down the campaign speeches into their subsets of supporting lies? Burden the economy with too many customers able to decipher the hospital bills, or see around the corners of the four-color advertising, and the consequences would be terrible to behold.” (p. 18)
Did I say cutting wit? Sliced, diced, chopped, and filleted might be more like it.
“To conceive of education as a commodity… is to construe the idea of democracy as the freedom of a market instead of a freedom of the mind.” “…unless we stop telling ourselves that America is best understood as the sum of its gross domestic product, we stand little chance of re-imagining our history or reengineering our schools.” (p. 18)
“The truth… …It’s synonymous with the courage derived from the habit of not running a con game on the unique and specific temper of one’s own mind. What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices.” (p. 19)
Amen… Amen.
There is much more to this fine preamble than my meager copy-and-paste can convey. Find and read it when L.Q. is finished formatting their new website (here likely).
As noted I rate this issue SIX out of five stars. As much as I like every issue of L.Q. this one is particularly superb.
L.Q. notes “Lapham’s Quarterly is a journal of literature and history…”. If you think history isn’t useful, isn’t everything history as soon as it passes from the transient moments of now? (Read L.Q. Fall 2014:Time.) Isn’t everything we do in the present related to learning history, learning the fundamentals of communicating, caring for ourselves and others, learning to survive, learning anything? I say so. Our ways of learning directly impact how well we survive.
I liked a LOT of this issue. (See the link at the beginning for more musings on Ways Of Learning.) The contemporary full essays at the end were exceptional also. I could copy 3/4ths of the issue for your enlightenment and edification. Perhaps some issue I’ll comment on the extracts that went over my head or I didn’t care for. I trust it would be a shorter list.
I’m surprised when I look on Goodreads.com for reviews of L.Q. Many people have read them but few comment. Many who do say WOW, this is great!
Find this issue. Buy it, borrow it, read, read, read. Perhaps you will see it as a way of learning… and living.
SIX out of five stars!! (That’s not easy but it’s not the Math issue. Read further.)
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” –H.G. Wells 1920 (Inside front cover.) [Isn't that the truth these days. -JH]
Authors, to name a few: Jefferson, Montessori, Abigail Adams, Milton, Auden, Brecht, Orwell, Dali’, Cleaver, Aristophanes, Rousseau, Descarte, Da Vinci, Plato, Bronte, Dickens, Helen Keller, Emerson, Seneca, Nietzsche, Chaucer, Hesse, Plath, Woolf, Roosevelt (T.), Dahl, Diderot, Erasmus, Twain, Thoreau, and Boethius.
This issue sections of Voices In Time:
The Hypothesis
The Experiment
Product & Byproduct
The theme graphic this issue is The Art Of Knowing by Joyce Pendola. Its micro print charts Cartography, Writing, Autopsy, and Construction from c. 3500 BC to 2008.
Lewis Lapham’s preamble never fails to be eloquent and insightful. It is titled Playing With Fire, perhaps an allusion to the opening quote:
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” –Plutarch (p. 13)
This is the best preamble I’ve read in Lapham’s Quarterly. When L.Q. is finished formatting the new website you MUST read this in its entirety. (If you do not deign to own the entire issue of course.)
Lapham immediately rails against the declining quality of education. Who can argue with that?
He notes that Jefferson founded the Univ. of Virginia “to develop “the reasoning faculties of our youth,” … to advance “the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of a nation.”” (p. 15)
By 1909 then Princeton Univ. president Woodrow Wilson was stating “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,” “…and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific manual tasks.” (p. 15) Hmm. ‘A very much larger [less educated] class….’ [How nice. -JH]
Lewis: “The framework of American education set up at the outset of the twentieth century has proved itself well-fitted to the specifications of the national security state that at the end of World War II replaced what was once a democratic republic.” (p. 16) Cutting, Mr. Lapham. Cutting.
“Students don’t go to school to acquire the wisdom of Solomon. They go to school to acquire a cash value and improve their lot, to pick up the keys to the kingdom stocked with the treasure to be found in a BMW showroom or Arizona golf resort.” (p. 16)
“Under the rules of egalitarian procedure, the schools must teach everything to everybody (algebra and the novels of Jane Austen as well as the manipulation of the iPhone and the condom). …Even more wonderful, they must entertain the fiction that everybody can learn to write as well as Jefferson or to think as clearly as Rene’ Descartes.” (p. 16)
“The tide of mediocrity flows into the classroom from the ocean that is the society at large, …the students headed into overcrowded classrooms where they major in the art of boredom and the science of diminished expectations…” (p. 18)
“Why would any politician in his or her right mind wish to confront an informed citizenry capable of breaking down the campaign speeches into their subsets of supporting lies? Burden the economy with too many customers able to decipher the hospital bills, or see around the corners of the four-color advertising, and the consequences would be terrible to behold.” (p. 18)
Did I say cutting wit? Sliced, diced, chopped, and filleted might be more like it.
“To conceive of education as a commodity… is to construe the idea of democracy as the freedom of a market instead of a freedom of the mind.” “…unless we stop telling ourselves that America is best understood as the sum of its gross domestic product, we stand little chance of re-imagining our history or reengineering our schools.” (p. 18)
“The truth… …It’s synonymous with the courage derived from the habit of not running a con game on the unique and specific temper of one’s own mind. What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices.” (p. 19)
Amen… Amen.
There is much more to this fine preamble than my meager copy-and-paste can convey. Find and read it when L.Q. is finished formatting their new website (here likely).
As noted I rate this issue SIX out of five stars. As much as I like every issue of L.Q. this one is particularly superb.
L.Q. notes “Lapham’s Quarterly is a journal of literature and history…”. If you think history isn’t useful, isn’t everything history as soon as it passes from the transient moments of now? (Read L.Q. Fall 2014:Time.) Isn’t everything we do in the present related to learning history, learning the fundamentals of communicating, caring for ourselves and others, learning to survive, learning anything? I say so. Our ways of learning directly impact how well we survive.
I liked a LOT of this issue. (See the link at the beginning for more musings on Ways Of Learning.) The contemporary full essays at the end were exceptional also. I could copy 3/4ths of the issue for your enlightenment and edification. Perhaps some issue I’ll comment on the extracts that went over my head or I didn’t care for. I trust it would be a shorter list.
I’m surprised when I look on Goodreads.com for reviews of L.Q. Many people have read them but few comment. Many who do say WOW, this is great!
Find this issue. Buy it, borrow it, read, read, read. Perhaps you will see it as a way of learning… and living.
December 21, 2008
Excellent compendium of excerpts on education and learning from a vast assortment of prominent historical figures. Lapham's is the best, though every time I get the next quarterly in the mail, the sheer bulk and density of it gives me an anxiety attack.
February 3, 2024
This anthology has so much good stuff in it. I specifically remember the Helen Keller excerpt; it was profound to me. I loved it.
Read
April 18, 2010I loved the first three, on States of War, Money, and the Book of Nature--really got a lot out of them, especially the essays at the back.
Read
March 3, 2010very cool "magazine" of sorts.
April 5, 2014
An excellent issue, a microcosm of what Lapham's Quarterly is all about.
April 4, 2009
Absolutely love this Quarterly. Takes me a while to get through, but edited beautifully.
April 9, 2017
Phenomenal issue. The quality of the initial essay, and the essays at the end, were outstanding. The thing I like about Lapham's is that they don't push a specific worldview on you. In fact, they specifically juxtapose essays or excerpts which take contradictory positions - which provokes thinking.
What is the purpose of education? Is it about learning a trade, a method, a process for thinking? Or is it for producing an informed, moral citizenry who are capable of guiding society? After reading this issue, you'll be better-prepared to answer this question for yourself.
My only criticism of this issue is that it focused disproportionately on traditional undergraduate education (especially the essays). I would have loved to hear more on elementary education as well, or community colleges, or other diverse paths.
My favorite interior section was the first, "The Hypothesis", probably because it seemed the most diverse.
What is the purpose of education? Is it about learning a trade, a method, a process for thinking? Or is it for producing an informed, moral citizenry who are capable of guiding society? After reading this issue, you'll be better-prepared to answer this question for yourself.
My only criticism of this issue is that it focused disproportionately on traditional undergraduate education (especially the essays). I would have loved to hear more on elementary education as well, or community colleges, or other diverse paths.
My favorite interior section was the first, "The Hypothesis", probably because it seemed the most diverse.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews