How to Preserve the Lifeworld and Renew the Public Sphere

"Preserving The Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education," by Paul Lakeland, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut, is a 6,000-word essay that is less about the "lifeworld" and the "public sphere" than it is about higher education. Anyone who reads it might be inclined to think that is more about the influence of mass media on an increasingly sheepish and ineffective society than it as about higher education. Although, Lakeland argues that higher education is both the cause and the solution to the society he laments.

Instructions

    • 1

      Apply to, attend and support colleges and universities that encourage their students, as Lakeland puts it, "to put their world into perspective, to examine it critically and -- as Dostoevsky might say -- to take an attitude toward it."

    • 2

      Encourage students you know to actively confront "the single biggest weakness in the ethos of undergraduate education today...a lack of critical capacity and sensitivity."

    • 3

      Urge your students, if you are a college instructor, to cultivate a "sense of a public sphere" and participate in politics. Lakeland argues that politics is too important in a democracy to be left only to politicians.

    • 4

      Strive to see "the pathology of life in late capitalist societies as the colonization of the lifeworld by the system."

    • 5

      Refuse, if you attend, teach at or administer any institution of higher learning, to succumb to an "overemphasis on specialization" at the undergraduate level.

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