As a student deeply immersed in nineteenth-century British studies and literary criticism, I certainly expected at the end of my doctoral labors to be effortlessly translated, like Enoch, into a higher kind of academic heaven-haven, levitated up and out of my library carrel at Chicago, hur tled toward success down [an] acoustically lined tube, and gently low ered into another library carrel at good old Research U, presumably in a beautiful city with a good symphony and affordable housing, where I would be a faculty member adored by a handful of student researchers who would hang breathlessly on each of my well-polished, professionally impeccable words. (2 0)

All real classrooms are saturated in the fictional narratives about education from TV and movies that swirl about thickly and persistently in western culture, yet the influence that these fictions exert on real teachers and real students is seldom examined. This article argues that since these fictional narratives nearly always deal in recycled stereotypes of both students and teachers, and that since these stereotypes are both ubiquitous and compelling, and that since they seldom receive critical attention, the influence they exert on real teachers and real students is to mislead, confuse, and impoverish their evaluations of and expectations about the nature of genuine education.

T H E S TA RT O F T H E journal’s fourth volume seems a good moment for reflection. Immediately striking is that, since our first issue, the wider higher education context in which we all work has changed hardly at all. In that issue’s editorial we marked out a number of influential trends which have, as it were, only become trendier: ‘massification’, coupled with reduced resource for teaching; a dominant discourse of the marketplace; a related ‘instrumental’ pedagogic discourse of measurable ‘learning outcomes’ and of ‘transferable skills’; increased resource for and dependence on C&ITs in teaching, and the emergence of a ‘blended’ form of education for all. In that context, by contrast we argued that ‘. . . teaching is not a matter of efficiency or productivity or professional skill but of creating value; pedagogy is not a technique applied to subject matter but a systematic exploration of the discipline’s vital processes’. We re-affirm those beliefs here, along with our aims for the journal’s development – ‘no less than a challenge to our whole community to reassess the value and values of a higher education in the Arts and Humanities, and the various pedagogic modes that deliver it’. Since that first issue certain common socio-political, pedagogic and research concerns have certainly emerged: the place of Arts and Humanities higher education in contemporary society, the ‘global’ market; curriculum formation and change; access to higher education, the transition from secondary schooling; re-examining established teaching-learning methods and evaluating new ones (‘theory in practice’, practice-based, collaborative, problem-based, cross-cultural, and online methods); new approaches to developing students’ writing and to assessment; gender issues; existential issues; issues surrounding identity, multi-disciplinarity, distance education. . . . And, not least, the distinctiveness and value of our academic domain, its many disciplines and fields (to date including Art, Art History, Cultural Studies, Design, European Studies, History, Humanities Computing, Language, Literature, Law, Modern Languages, Music, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Theatre Studies). In

This essay argues that teachers would be more effective at promoting students' willingness to work hard at course content that seems to them remote and abstract if teachers explicitly presented that content to students more as a means to their education rather than as the aim of their education. Teachers should confront the fact that most of the content they teach will be forgotten by students. Once this fact is accepted, then it follows that teaching content that teachers know will be forgotten as if it should never be forgotten is myopic and perhaps dysfunctional. An alternative teaching model is to use course content to stimulate the flourishing of developmental human skills—rationality, language, aesthetic responsiveness, imagination, introspection, moral and ethical deliberation, sociability, and physicality—in the service of a developmental notion of liberal education that can never go out of date and can never be forgotten because its effects become absorbed as developmentally advanced orientations of life, not crammed into short-term memory for the sake of passing tests.

Now that the intensity of the Culture Wars has abated, a humanities discourse about human nature that has been practically impossible to conduct in nonpartisan terms for the last 25 years or so can be revisited and reconstructed. In an attempt to revive that discourse, the following argument critiques the extreme postmodern position of ‘constructed humanity’ and offers an argument about the necessity and usefulness of a modest version of essentialism based on the ethical claim that respect for the Other can only be made with authority when it is based on an appeal to common humanity, not when it is based on an appeal to some ad hoc, abstract principle of Difference. Yet postmodern claims about the shaping pressures of language, history, culture, gender, race, ethnicity, and class play important roles in helping us understand how a common human nature gets mediated by cultural contexts. In the end the Humanities need the perspectives of both humanists and postmodernists to keep humanistic discourse about human nature rich and productive.