SOURCE: A review of An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America, in MultiCultural Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, June, 1993, pp. 79–80.

In the following review, Showalter argues that although Barber is right to attempt to redefine “the usual paradigms in discussing education,” his lack of concrete suggestions severely weakens his position.

The strength of [An Aristocracy of Everyone] lies in its author's determination to transcend the usual paradigms in discussing education. Instead of concentrating on questions of finance, curriculum, or administration, Barber argues that public education must be understood as education for citizenship. This means the educator's essential task is teaching liberty: helping men and women acquire the skills necessary for freedom. For Barber, the first of these skills is “temporality.” Students, he argues, must acquire a sense of their identity as a process of history; liberty cannot exist apart from its origins. A second...