This article is an investigation of two apparently contradictory impulses in Oakeshott's writings about liberal education. On the one hand, he implied that it was primarily "aesthetic", something undertaken for its own sake with no practical consequences. On the other hand, he often implied that a student might undergo a moral transformation in…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

Scholars who have taken interest in "Theaetetus'" educational theme argue that Plato contrasts an inferior, even dangerous, sophistic education to a superior, philosophical, Socratic education. I explore the contrasting exhortations, methods, ideals and epistemological foundations of Socratic and Protagorean education and suggest that Socrates'…

It is contended that in Harvey Pegues's essay on objectivism and constructivism in the summer 2007 issue of "The Educational Forum", Pegues conducted an intellectual discourse in which legitimate or good-faith disagreement was not an option, and disparaged and imputed the negative motives with which he disagreed. This article responds by pointing…

For generations, critics have dismissed James Forman's "Black Manifesto" as a rhetorical failure. Such judgments tend to focus on the prophetic and retributive registers of the speech and fail to account for the full range of its ironic structuration. By examining the complex interchange of prophetic, retributive, and tragic registers through…

Teaching rhetorical production in a digital age calls for us to rethink our discipline's current distaste for writing mechanics. Yet, the digital mechanics of writing are much broader than grammatical concerns. They include production tools that allow for the invention and circulation of audio, visual, and Multigenre writing. (Contains 3 figures…

Notes that little has appeared in the literature on the relations of the postmodern intervention to the work of rhetoric past and present. Argues that the advent of the postmodern challenges the historiographic method of most histories of rhetoric. Argues that the historian of rhetoric is engaged in cultural politics that cannot be avoided. (RS)

In this article, the author argues that Emerson repudiated the formalism of nineteenth century belletristic, mechanistic, reason-centered, American rhetoric influenced by Hugh Blair. Instead Emerson promoted a rhetoric with imagination at its center, which calls for civic duty. (Contains 33 notes.)

Argues that the two principle modes of organizing rhetorical theories in histories of rhetoric (according to influence or systems) frequently mask or distort the particularity of rhetoric's history. Forwards an alternative critical history that privileges the notions of text, particularity, change, and criticism. (SR)

Ghosts haunt the school curriculum. Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" provides a starting point for thinking about these curriculum ghosts. In the Preface, he states that he has "endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea". In this article, the author seeks to raise the ghost of an idea, and to…

We examine a century of rhetoric on the home/school relation and investigate how current ideas about this relationship and associated parent involvement might inhibit the realization of justice, equity, and excellence in education. The phrase home/school relation refers to the actual and theoretical pattern of prescribed interactions and…

In the process of delegitimating the master narratives that have sustained Western civilization in the past, Postmodernism provoked a "crisis in narrative" which Francois Lyotard describes as narrativity that presents a sense of loss but not of what is lost. Recent histories of rhetoric have promulgated the view that rhetorical maps…

This paper examines the life and works of Meridel LeSueur, a colleague of Kenneth Burke, and herself a radical writer during the 1920s and 1930s. The paper states that LeSueur's primary aim was to establish an indigenous working-class culture to support working-class action. It notes that her arguments about writing build upon the rhetorical…

Criticizes Hegel's "rehabilitation" of the Sophists as an example of the dangers that are inherent in judging rhetorical contents of theories by philosophical standards rather than rhetorical ones. Argues that Hegel placed the Sophists in philosophy's historical continuity by eliminating consideration of their rhetorical stances and the…

Compares the views of Isocrates and Plato on rhetoric and rhetorical education. Elucidates their criticisms of the sophists, their general assumptions about the nature and function of rhetoric, and their views on rhetorical education. (PRA)