EduFest2024

Is education simply placing pearls of wisdom by a teacher who has mastered a subject into the willing and eager receptacle of the student’s mind, or is it something more? Is it the sharing of given nuggets of knowledge, or is it the transformative process of learning how knowledge flourishes while deepening one’s grasp and understanding of various disciplines?  Since its founding, the University of Chicago has anchored its approach to education on teaching the how not the what, and on the idea that to successfully do so, absolute freedom of inquiry and expression must be the anchor value. The results speak for themselves: a relatively young university that has produced nearly 100 Nobel Prizes in fields ranging from economics to chemistry, physics to peace. This session will offer an overview of the Chicago tradition of free inquiry and expression and what it offers for the field of education.