scholarly journals Cicero Versus Socrates: The Liberal Arts Debate in the 1960s at the University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus

Author(s):  
James M. Pitsula

The liberal arts debate among the faculty at Regina Campus in the 1960s reflected the social and political movements of the day, especially the rise of student power and the New Left. At the same time, it revived a much older debate about the nature of liberal education, which historian Bruce Kimball traces back to the thought of Socrates and Cicero. Kimball’s typology of “orators” versus “philosophers” brings order and clarity to what otherwise appears as a jumbled mix of conflicting viewpoints. The “oratorical” tradition favors general education based on knowable truth as a means to prepare youth for responsible and active citizenship. The “philosophical” or “liberal-free” ideal emphasizes the freedom to search for truth, an eternal quest that never attains its goal, and has led to the dominance of scientific research and the fragmentation of knowledge. The “orators” lost the sixties debate, and the “liberal-free” ideal is now almost uncontested.

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 90-109
Author(s):  
Aurora Morcillo

This article focuses on the repression of the student movement in the University of Granada during the state of exception of 1970. It relates the experiences of two students, Socorro and Jesus, a couple who joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and suffered persecution and imprisonment. The Francoist university was governed by the University Regulatory Law (URL, University Regulatory Law) issued in 1943, which was replaced with the promulgation of the General Law of Education in 1970. As I explained in my previous work, the Catholic national rhetoric of the Franco regime forged an ideal "True Catholic Woman" based on the resurgence of the values ​​of purity and subordination of the 16th century counter reform as proposed by Luis Vives in The Instruction of the Christian Woman (1523) and Fray Luis de León in The Perfect Wife (1583). This ideal of a woman came to contradict the ideal of an intellectual built on the letter of the Ley de Ordenación Universitaria (1943). The transition to the consumer economy in the 1950s with the military and economic aid of the United States, as well as the social Catholicism of the Second Vatican Council in the sixties along with the arrival of tourism and emigration to Europe changed the social fabric and opened the doors of the classrooms to an increasing number of women, especially in the humanities careers of Philosophy and Letters. Through the analysis of interviews conducted in the late 1980s with two people who participated in the clandestine student movement, this article explores how young people transgressed the official discourse on the Catholic ideal of women, claimed the university environment for the working class and created a neutral space in terms of gender in which they could achieve their commitment to study, democratic freedom and feminism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 188-205
Author(s):  
Julia Stępniewska ◽  
Piotr Zańko ◽  
Adam Fijałkowski

In this text, we ask about the relationship between sexual education in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s with the cultural contestation and the moral (including sexual) revolution in the West as seen through the eyes of Prof. Andrzej Jaczewski (1929–2020) – educationalist, who for many years in 1970s and 1980s conducted seminars at the University of Cologne, pediatrician, sexologist, one of the pioneers of sexual education in Poland. The movie “Sztuka kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej” (“The Art of Love. The Story of Michalina Wisłocka” [1921–2005]), directed in 2017 by Maria Sadowska, was the impulse for our interview. After watching it, we discovered that the counter-cultural background of the West in the 1960s and 1970s was completely absent both in the aforementioned film and in the discourse of Polish sex education at that time. Moreover, Andrzej Jaczewski’s statement (July 2020) indicates that the Polish concept of sexual education in the 1960s and 1970s did not arise under the influence of the social and moral revolution in the West at the same time, and its originality lay in the fact that it was dealt with by professional doctors-specialists. We put Andrzej Jaczewski’s voice in the spotlight. Our voice is usually muted in this text, it is more of an auxiliary function (Chase, 2009). Each of the readers may impose their own interpretative filter on the story presented here.


LOGOS ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-25
Author(s):  
David Emblidge

Cody’s Books, in Berkeley, California, had its roots during the mid-1950s in the left-wing sympathies of its founders, the husband–wife team of Fred and Patricia Cody. Serving the University of California nearby, the much admired bookstore became a hangout and haven for intellectually curious students and faculty. In the social protest movements of the 1960s, the store functioned as a refuge from street violence as students and police clashed outside. When long-term employee Andy Ross bought the shop upon the Codys’ retirement, it was a thriving business but soon ran into challenges from encroaching chain stores and the emergence of online shopping. Ross responded variously: sometimes with ambitious, effective bookselling tactics, sometimes with ineffective resentment towards consumers who had abandoned the store. Attempts to survive through risky refinancing and the infusion of foreign investment money to support expansion into San Francisco all backfired. The last Cody’s branch closed ignominiously in 2008.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
Terence Renaud

AbstractThe New Left that arose in West Germany during the 1960s mimicked the antifascist reformations of the 1930s. For grassroots campaigns, extraparliamentary opposition groups, and radical student organizations of the postwar decades, the Marxist humanist theories and revolutionary socialist splinter groups of the interwar years served as attractive models. At the same time, the Sixty-eighter generation rebelled against a political establishment now represented by that earlier generation of neoleftist pioneers, their parents. But generational conflict was just the symptom of a deeper problem in the history of the midcentury Left: a succession of radical new lefts arose out of periodic frustration at institutionalized politics. This article explores the missing link between Germany’s antifascist and antiauthoritarian new lefts: the so-called left socialists of the 1950s. In particular, Ossip K. Flechtheim’s science of futurology and Wolfgang Abendroth’s theory of antagonistic society translated antifascism’s legacies into a new paradigm of social protest. The left socialists’ support for the embattled Socialist German Student League laid the organizational and intellectual foundation for the sixties New Left. Recent studies of the “global sixties” have shown the transnational connections between new lefts across space; this article explains their continuity across time.


1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Αναστασία Οικονομίδου

This thesis examines how changes in gender relations occurring in the British society of the 1960s were depicted in the fiction of the period. In particular, it analyses the specific gender representations found in the work of Kingsley Amis, John Fowles and Margaret Drabble. By locating the major differences in the way gender is inscribed in the work of the above authors it raises the question of the role of the gender and ideological position of the writers in the establishment of their perspective. The analysis revolves round the central question of the relation between literature and its context. Therefore, it situates the novels in question within the social, ideological and literary context of the time when they were produced and, through a detailed textual analysis, it delineates the multiple and complex ways in which the particular fictions engage with their context. The first chapter offers an account of the social and ideological context of the sixties by concentrating on three particular areas: legislative changes, ideological debates and the emergence of radical movements. The second chapter establishes the critical perspective from which the novels are approached by situating it within the broader framework of contemporary schools of feminist literary criticism. The third, fourth and fifth chapters are devoted to a textual analysis of three major novels by each of the three authors.


Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Zieleniec

Henri Lefebvre is now established as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century. Over a long life (b. 1901–d. 1991) he wrote and published prodigiously more than sixty books and several hundred articles on a range of issues and themes. His legacy and lasting impact not only includes being the most influential and seminal theorist on the reprioritization of space in social and critical analysis but also recognition for his contribution to the analysis of everyday life, modernity, the Right to the City, and the urban. He continues to influence and inspire research across a number of disciplines and fields; these include rural and regional studies, sociology, geography, politics, philosophy, and urban studies. Lefebvre’s commitment Marxism; his nondogmatic and humanist approach to the definition, discussion, extension, and application of key concepts; and his integration of those concepts into his various analyses of the rural and the city, of the state, of space and politics, and of modernity and everyday life led him to a conflicted relationship and at times marginalization within the structuralist-influenced French Academy and the Communist Party of France in which he was a member for thirty years. His anti-Stalinist stance and nonconformist opposition to the structural determinism prevalent within the party led to his expulsion, but throughout the 1960s, as professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and latterly at the new university at Nanterre, he became one of the most respected teachers and intellectuals inspiring and influencing the May 1968 student revolt. Lefebvre’s work after that, still influenced and committed to Marxist dialectics and critique, increasingly focused on the urban, the social production of space, everyday life, modernity, and the survival of capitalism. Of these his introduction of the concept of the right to the city and the social production of space have been immensely influential for a range of urban scholars and theorists and his work as a whole is being increasingly adopted, adapted, and extended by a variety of researchers of the city in a range of disciplines. The works selected below reflect Lefebvre’s long career and extensive corpus of work. However, only those books and articles that have been translated into English are included here. They represent his exegesis of Marxism and its application to a range of themes that were applied or are important for urban analysis. The secondary literature cited is organized thematically and while not comprehensive provides an overview of the expanding literature on, about, and applying Lefebvrian analysis.


2015 ◽  
pp. 2-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara A. Godwin

During the last two decades, liberal education (often called liberal arts or general education) has emerged with surprising prevalence in places where it has rarely existed before.  A new study provides an inaugural profile about where, when, and in what format liberal education is emerging worldwide, identifies regional trends, and raises critical questions.


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