Beyond Reason and Tolerance: The Purpose and Practice of Higher Education

Thompson, a professor of psychology and neurophysiology and former dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, identifies the major challenge facing higher education as preparing students for life-long learning and society’s 21st century needs for civic minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society.

A developmental science basis is adopted to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference. The focus is on emerging adulthood as an especially dynamic time of reorganization and development of the brain that both influences, and is influenced by, the undergraduate experience, and advances in our understanding of human development and learning are synthesized with regard to the direct implications for undergraduate education practices.

For a review of the book see Inside Higher Ed.