Academic Rationalism

Academic rationalism is an orientation to the curriculum that honors the role of traditional content in the development of the rational human mind. Along with many adherents to other orientations, academic rationalists understand that, because of time constraints, not all available curriculum content can be taught in schools. To avoid an overstuffed curriculum, academic rationalists recommend a distinct criterion for answering the classic curriculum question regarding what knowledge is of most worth. For them, the most worthwhile learning centers on those enduring ideas and artifacts that have stood the test of time. The works that contain the greatest products of the human mind thus become the canon of the school curriculum.

Academic rationalists believe that human nature is unchanging and that there are eternal truths to [Page 3]be discovered in a world outside of human beings. They therefore emphasize those perennial issues of human life as embodied within the traditional academic disciplines. For some academic rationalists, this includes all of the lasting productions of humanity. For others, these disciplines are those that have survived for centuries primarily within Western civilization, especially those originating in ancient Greece. Proponents of this latter form of academic rationalism that ignores important ideas and objects originating in non-Western cultures have been accused by critics of Eurocentrism.

Academic rationalists are closely associated with the liberal arts tradition within the academy. The ideas within, and products of, the liberal arts are viewed as the sources of human enlightenment. Following the lead of Plato in The Republic (Book VII), academic rationalists believe in the power of reason for guiding humankind closer to enhanced understanding and appreciation of the eternal standards of truth, goodness, and formal beauty. The mental activities of logic and contemplation are seen as means for moving humans away from the sources of confusion emanating from within the manual and practical activities of mundane experience and toward the formal realities that are the province of the human intellect. In that manner humans become liberated, able to transcend the ephemera of earthly affairs as they engage with other intellectuals in a Great Conversation about the common heritage of all humankind. Liberated from earthly emotions and passions through the elevated discourse of the curriculum, humans are freed to become less like animals (or for the ancient Greeks, slaves) and ever more human.

Dimensions of academic rationalism, usually under the label of the liberal arts tradition, can be found throughout the history of Western civilization. After ancient Greece, the orientation continued in the classical Roman period, and later, modified by Christian scholars in the Middle Ages, the curriculum philosophy could be found permeating church schools. Academic rationalism has prevailed in both Europe and the United States in much of the last three centuries. During this time, the historical reality continued: A liberal education was generally available only to wealthy young men, the classical canon of academic rationalism became the curriculum of the elite, leisure, and moneyed classes.

In the United States, however, during the 20th century, the influence of academic rationalism slowly declined as a result of the growth of the middle class and its desires for a more practical, vocational based curriculum. Later, the tenets of academic rationalism (sometimes referred to as the traditional curriculum) were challenged by progressive educators, such as the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. But the liberal tradition and academic rationalism have rebounded at several points in U.S. educational history. Perhaps the most notable resurgence was the result of the work in the 1930s and 1940s of a group of University of Chicago professors that included Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.

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