Books in the Association for Core Texts and Courses series

The Association for Core Texts and Courses (ACTC) asserts its commitment to coming together and speaking about the scientific, the political, and the artistic to live together in an enlightened fashion. ACTC's Tenth Annual Conference re-affirmed and re-examined the value of serious reading and discussion focused through core texts.

Reform in general liberal education is inevitable for faculty and the administration. Core texts are at the heart of that reform debate. This collection of essays explores this debate and allows thinkers and practitioners of liberal arts education to see what other colleagues and institutions are developing.

This book contains essays of literary and philosophical accounts that explain who we are simply as persons, and essays that highlight who we are in light of communal ties. ACTC educators model the intellectual life for students and colleagues by showing how to read texts carefully and with sophistication.

This book selectively presents the thoughts of scholars and teachers of liberal arts, core text education on how their programs formulate and advance a 'value-centered' education. This volume should be of value to those working with colleagues and texts across disciplines to form a coherent undergraduate program within general education.

Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context is a selection of essays, presented or further developed from the 1999 Association of Core Texts and Courses conference in New Orleans, focusing on a few of the vertices or vortices, where an intensified sense of the interplay between the ways of knowledge may be glimpsed, or a memorable moment in the past when all briefly achieved a greater congruity may be revived for new consideration. These essays fall into an organization according to the major scheme each posits as unifying, or attempting to unify, the liberal arts.

This volume reminds readers that dedicated teachers at colleges and universities are passing on the heritage of liberal education as well as constructing its future. All readers will benefit from the insights of this volume the historical, ethical, literary and philosophical perspectives provided by core text liberal arts education.

The essays in this volume reflect on the idea of excellence embedded within core texts, as well as how such texts influence and ennoble higher education. The authors consider rival forms of excellence from ancient Greece and Rome, through modern Europe and America, and beyond.

This book asks what do we learn of texts, cultures, and the world's dynamics when we read core texts, widely and deeply, in core-structured programs of the world's colleges and universities? The answers offered are drawn from the widest possible spectrum of institutions and disciplines who offer horizon-expanding liberal educations.