Education as Self-Fashioning: How to be a Public Intellectual

Can education impart more than bookish learning? This is the question that critics have posed since the European Renaissance. Through their reflections, these critics posited an alternative ideal of education that prepared the student for life outside the academy. Over the centuries, this ideal would evolve into what we would today call an 'intellectual' - but this modern concept only captures a part of what earlier writers thought learning could achieve. In this course, we will focus on how education can prepare students to engage in public debates and the role that the university can play in public learning.