John Gray’s anti-Enlightenment [Stephen Hicks’s Pope Lecture]

In this invited lecture, Dr. Hicks surveys key educational ideas from pre-modern times, the modern era, and our post-modern times. Ancient education often stressed discipline, obedience and rule following, while modern thinkers such as Galileo, Locke, and Montaigne stressed independent judgment and the power of reason. He then examines a series postmodern (and fellow-traveler) thinkers Richard Rorty, Andrea Dworkin, Jacques Derrida, Henry Giroux, and Chandra Mohanty, among others — who variously claim reason is weak, impotent, a tool of white and/or male and/or Eurocentric domination — and that the classroom is an activist site of political power struggles. He concludes with a look at the empirical data vindicating reason in light of our advances in political freedom, scientific knowledge, and economic prosperity in the last 200 years.

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