existentialism’s esoteric concepts have a practical role in the contemporary school curriculum
Set 1 (pick 4 from each set)
1. Examine whether existentialism’s esoteric concepts have a practical role in the contemporary school curriculum.
2. Evaluate the roles of individualism and individual choice in the schools, as advocated by some existentialists.
3. Illustrate how a school curriculum based around ideas of the analytic school would teach critical thinking and language development.
4. Evaluate whether analytic philosophy has practical applications to the curriculum.
5. Examine the existentialism of Maxine Greene as contemporary advocate of this philosophy.
6. Jean Paul Sartre was another major existentialist whose ideas have had a significant impact. What relevance do his ideas (as represented in the text) have for contemporary education in the United States?
Set 2
1. Evaluate whether Marx’s concepts of materialism and class warfare are reflected in some of the issues faced by schools in American today.
2. 2. Give two examples of the Hegelian Dialectic as it might apply to the teaching of critical thinking in a particular area of the school curriculum.
3. 3. Examine the extent to which the No Child Left Behind program could be interpreted as an application of Marxism in American education.
4. 4. Illustrate the similarities and differences between postmodernism and both pragmatism and Marxism.
5. 5. Of the five great stages of historical development that Marx hypothesized, evaluate the proposition that we are presently at the end of stage four, and that we (in the U.S.) are swiftly transitioning to stage five.
6. 6. Examine the idea that some postmodernists see as the principle aim of education: self- and social empowerment.