"The End of Education"

In this talk, Professor Charles Dorn will explore the multiple and sometimes conflicting ends or purposes Americans have ascribed to public education in the United States over time. Examining three significant periods in history, he will show how, for better or worse, K-12 public schooling has remained committed to serving the needs of the nation-state.

Professor Dorn is the Barry N. Wish Professor of Social Studies in the education department at Bowdoin College. His research examines the civic purposes adopted by and ascribed to centers of early childhood education, public elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities. His work has appeared in Diplomatic History, Southern African Review of Education, Foro de Educación, and History of Education Quarterly, as well as in Fortune Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and Time Magazine. He is the author of For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell University Press, 2017) and, with Randall Curren, of Patriotic Education in a Global Age (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Dorn is the recipient of two US State Department Fulbright Scholar Awards and, most recently, a Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.

To view a live-stream of this talk, please visit the Bowdoin Talks webpage.