Disciplining Opinion: The American Revolution in Education

Geoffrey Harpham
Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics
Duke University

With response by Michael Gillespie, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Duke University

"Disciplining Opinion: The American Revolution in Education" will identify an "American" system of education that emerged at the end of the second World War. This system--universal, general, and liberal--grew out of a triumphant national self-understanding, and was designed with the projected needs of a democratic society, rather than the professions or the civil service, in mind. Central to this system was the project of training and disciplining the mighty but potentially anarchic force of opinion, which de Tocqueville identified as the "mistress of the world" in American society.