This chapter shows the essay’s troubled evolution as an academic genre in the nineteenth century, from the norms of classical rhetoric taught in English schools to the professionalising educational practices of Scottish universities and their American counterparts. Aimed to introduce meritocracy to Oxford and Cambridge’s class preferment system, the rise of essay-based public examinations in the 1850s reshaped the academic essay to sustain an informational mastery of the complexities of British imperial rule. Professors of English reacted to the new public-exam essay regime with one of two tactics. One was to strip the essay down to a managerial model that came to be known as the five-paragraph essay, shorn of classical figurality and stressing correct usage. Meanwhile, advocates of liberal education revived the teaching of the literary essay based on Victorian models, setting up a lengthy dispute in the twentieth century between literary and social-scientific protocols of essay writing.

This chapter traces the evolution of the educational concept Bildung, beginning with its roots in ancient Western thought, then to its formation in Weimar classicism and Hegel’s thought, and finally to the adoption of those German traditions in contemporary American educational thought.

Times of crisis call for powerful rhetoric. This section consists of seven speeches that address political, moral, or educational crises of their time. They range from high points of rhetoric to dishonest or ineffective displays of rhetoric. The speakers include Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Allan Bloom.

This is a reflection on the international computing community’s efforts to define itself as a discipline and inject computing into the core education of everyone. Their aim is to prepare us for the technology-based society in which we work and live. Scholars who aim to explore the nature of No-Boundary Thinking can learn from the self-reflection of the computing discipline, and No-Boundary Thinking might be an essential solution for the effective integration of computing into the core body of knowledge needed by every educated individual. These connections might also assuage the recent frictions between STEM and liberal arts scholar educators.

In the spate of scholarship on boredom over the past two decades, the moral character of boredom has received little attention (Elpidorou, ). This is striking because boredom’s ancient precursor, acedia, was considered to be one of the deadliest vices and the source of several other destructive vices, including gluttony, lust, and anger (Bunge, ). In this respect, modern boredom arguably parallels acedia, as it is also casually linked to numerous problematic, arguably immoral behaviors. The state of boredom is morally significant because it adversely impacts both moral reasoning and the vision of flourishing that guides moral reasoning. Boredom is not simply a mood we must endure but a state of mind (certainly impacted by circumstances) that we need not be captive to. Its moral significance also needs to be underscored because there is something at stake: We can do something about what we find to be boring (boredom assessment) and how we contend with this mood state (boredom endurance).

This chapter builds on Stephen Salkever’s experience as one of the first political theorists to teach comparatively in a serious and sustained way. This work began in the 1980s with a co-taught course comparing ancient Greek and ancient Chinese texts. For Salkever, comparative teaching is a practice of what he calls liberal education, which aims to foster the habits of mind that sustain curiosity and critical self-reflection. Texts are chosen not as representative of a particular culture or tradition but as exemplars of original thinking that unsettled the self-understandings of their authors’ contemporaries as much as they might unsettle ours. In this chapter, Salkever reflects on the contributions of comparative political theory to “deparochializing” and “provincializing” Western political theory and even liberal education as such. Both ways of construing the tasks of comparative political theory see it as a form of “constructive escape” from our received opinions, which can limit our capacity for political judgment if they are left unexamined. Salkever draws out the implications of this way of understanding comparative political theory as an educational practice, highlighting the importance of juxtaposing contradictory texts within a given tradition (to resist cultural essentialism) as well as finding continuities across traditions.