Education
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14026/273
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item The Changing Face of Higher Education(2021-07-12T16:30:21-07:00) Cowan, DonaldItem The Idea of a Catholic University(1968-07-22T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldItem The Future of Education(1966-01-01T00:00:00-08:00) Cowan, DonaldWhen we consider the future of education, we must ask ourselves what it is we mean to discuss. Is there an implicit belief hidden in our concept of the future that makes us feel, as the blind prophet Tiresias says in Oedipus Rex, that "the future will come of itself, whether we know it or not. Is there not still a temptation in us, after nearly two thousand years of Christianity, to hang on to dark mists of fatalism: to an inexorable fate disguised as the working out of "trends" or forces of instability that, once set in motion, will grow automatically into what we like today to call "explosions." . . . The popularity of the ecology movement lies in such an appeal. We secretly somehow enjoy the conception of ourselves as being swept along by forces beyond our control.Item The Function of the University in the Present Age(1964-05-05T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldThe chief function of a university in our time is the restoration, preservation, and expansion of our culture.Item The Form of a University -- Faculty Day 1964(1964-01-01T00:00:00-08:00) Cowan, DonaldIn his book The Crisis in the University, Sir Walter Moberly classifies three conceptiosn of the university which developed during the 19th century and which we have inherited in the modern university.Item The Education of a Scientist(1963-05-10T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldThere is a well known book in American Literature called The Education of Henry Adams. it as an excellent account of how one outstanding mind acquired its understanding of our civilization. It is worth noting that only a few pages of that book are devoted to formal schooling. Education is a process that, for the inquiring mind, goes on at all times and throughout life, long after the degrees have been acquired.Item Faculty Day 1966(1966-09-06T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldThe second decade of the University of Dallas is opening with great portents. Even nature has paid us homage; for the first time in our history green grass will be on our campus at the opening of school--not only green, but mowed and trimmed, symbolizing, I suppose, our emergence from the wilderness. EVen now, the bulldozers are gathering to lay back the ground for a gymnasium, a graduate building, and the first structure deliberately designed to be useless, a tower. It is a mark of our maturity that we have resources to spare sufficient for a wholly symbolic edifice, one that expresses not so much our pride as our aspiration.Item Convocation 1965(1965-10-01T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldThis convocation officially opens the tenth academic year of the University of Dallas. For the historical record, I should point out that our charter is much older than that, dating back to 1910. Under this charter the University of Dallas existed for a dozen years in a handsome, huge structure on Oak Lawn, later occupied by Jesuit High School. There are many proud graduates of that institution around who love to reminisce about the old school. But there came a time when the Vincentian Order, who ran the University, found the going difficult and turned the charter and name of the University of Dallas over to the safekeeping of the Diocese; thus it was preserved for us, a good name to grace a new institution set on a hill overlooking the city.Item Remarks at Catholic Secondary Education Dinner(1968-10-20T00:00:00-07:00) Cowan, DonaldItem The Role of Literature in a Liberal Education(2001-01-01T00:00:00-08:00) Cowan, LouiseLet me just start out, then, by stating my thesis baldly: poetry is รข if not the most important element in a liberal education, at least one of the two most important constituents, sharing the honors with its traditional running mate, philosophy, which, I would say, however, is more sophisticated and less basic. Poetry (what we now call literature and underestimate by considering it primarily printed material in a book (with an emphasis on the high elitism of 19th century British writing) is the foundation, the base, the hallmark of liberal education. Its aim is not the corroboration of things we already know but the uncovering of what has been hidden. Its mode of expression is not syllogism and analysis, but on one hand image and metaphor, analogy and symbol, on the other tonality, the hidden resonances of language. Its effort is toward something as precise in its own way as the most careful intellectual analysis. It makes use of a kind of language that calls up the language of the soul, which needs, however, to be clarified and strengthened by education. It works by a faculty that has at various times been designated as imagination, the intercessor between sense and intellect.