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Books

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges And Universities Have Given Up On The Meaning of Life by Anthony Kronman

Mark Huston ponders Anthony Kronman’s arguments about why universities don’t teach the meaning of life.

Anthony T. Kronman is a former Dean of Law at Yale and is currently teaching in the Directed Studies Program at that University: a program in which students examine several great books of the Western tradition. Primarily, this book is his argument for a return to ‘secular humanism’ – by which he means the teaching of “the meaning of life in a deliberate and organized way” but without the trappings of religion (p.74). In addition he defends the view that the humanities are best able to provide these teachings, and the book ends up largely being a criticism of the current state of the humanities and a call to return the humanities to what they once were.

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