Beyond Reason and Tolerance: The Purpose and Practice of Higher Education

The major challenges facing higher education are often framed in terms of preparing students for life-long learning. Society's 21st century needs require civic-minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society. In this volume, Robert J. Thompson aims to influence the current conversation about the purposes and practices of higher education. Beyond Reason and Tolerance adopts a developmental science basis to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference. It synthesizes current scholarship regarding the nature and development of three core capacities deemed essential: A personal epistemology that reflects a sophisticated understanding of knowledge, beliefs, and ways of thinking; empathy and the capacity to understand the mental states of others; and an integrated identity that includes values, commitments, and a sense of agency for civic and social responsibility. Beyond Reason and Tolerance argues that to foster the development of these capabilities, colleges and universities must recommit to providing a formative liberal education and adopt a developmental model of undergraduate education as a process of intellectual and personal growth, involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies. Thompson focuses on emerging adulthood as an especially dynamic time of reorganization and development of the brain that both influences, and is influenced by, the undergraduate experience. Advances in our understanding of human development and learning are synthesized with regard to the direct implications for undergraduate education practices.

About the Author :
Robert J. Thompson is Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He was formerly Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Duke.

Review :
"Drawing on recent studies of cognition, neurophysiology, and educational psychology - most of it published over the past dozen years - Thompson provides what we might call a brain's-eye view of the rewards of studying the liberal arts, particularly in the late-adolescent/early adulthood period traditionally associated with the undergraduate years. [...] Writing as a scientist, the author makes a strong case for what his colleagues in the liberal arts do when they teach. And the lesson, it seems, is different in terms but not intent from the one taught in the senior-year course on moral philosophy, in the colleges of yesteryear: that the point of expanding the mind is to make it larger than the self." -Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed "[Thompson's] thinking naturally resonates with educators and psychologists. The book is diligently researched and beautifully argued. Thompson clearly understands the needs of the first-time college student and has done a masterful job of tying development to undergraduate education. His magnificent description of the value of a liberal arts education weaves an interdisciplinary tapestry that jumps from philosophy to psychology to education without missing a beat. The result is a book that is worthy of both reading and recommending. I spent a great deal of time reading it, and it was worth every minute. Although this book targets psychologists and educators, anyone who cares about higher education will benefit from reading it, and it is especially appropriate reading for legislators, civic leaders, and lawmakers with serious interests in higher education." --Robert G. Frank, PsycCRITIQUES