Abstract:The author uses Maxwell's method of literature reviews for educational research to focus on literature relevant to test-based grade retention policies to make the following argument: although some studies have documented average gains in academic achievement through test-based grade retention, there is increasing evidence that these gains have occurred by limiting the educational opportunities for the most vulnerable of students. The author begins by briefly synthesizing research on high-stakes testing policies and teacher-based retention in general and then examines studies that have evaluated specific test-based retention policies in Chicago,
Is there a distinctively artistic value that works of art have over and above their aesthetic value? No, Dominic McIver Lopes claims in a recent paper. He canvases various non-aesthetic options for underwriting artistic value. Yet he dispenses too quickly with a promising account of artistic value that would look to the artwork's status as an achievement as the basis of its value: On this achievement-based view, the value of the work of art as art (that is, its distinctively artistic value) consists in the artistically-relevant achievement that it itself constitutes. While I will not seek to vindicate the achievement view itself, I do want to show that Lopes's arguments against it are unsound. Moreover, I argue that Lopes's claim that artistic value might be nothing over and above aesthetic value is untenable, unless it is supplemented by the more basic claim that the aesthetic value in question is something achieved by an artist. Lopes's argument thus only works if he makes recourse to the achievement conception of artistic value that he is keen to reject.Is there a distinctively artistic value that works of art have over and above their aesthetic value? No, Dominic McIver Lopes claims in a recent paper. 1 To frame things in terms of the key distinction that Lopes uses, there are many values in art (it can lead to political change, improve our health, and so on). But not all of these are values of art as art. If there is such a properly artistic sort of value, Lopes thinks, then it is simply going to amount to aesthetic value. Lopes's paper thus presents the case for a form of skepticism about any non-aesthetic notion of artistic value. He canvases various non-aesthetic options for underwriting artistic value. Yet none, he thinks, is successful. He sets up a dilemma: One either collapses the distinction between values in art and values of art, trivially taking all values of the former (political, therapeutic, etc.) to be values of the latter. This would, however, deprive the concept of artistic value of its ability to mark off the distinctive value of art as art. Or else-as Lopes prefers-one equates the work's artistic value with its aesthetic value. Either way, Lopes 1 D.
Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture"In 1872 Nietzsche shocked the European philological community with the publication of e Birth of Tragedy. In this fervid rst book Nietzsche looked to ancient Greek culture in the hope of nding the path to a revitalization of modern German culture. Cultural health was at this point unquestionably his paramount concern. Yet postwar Nietzsche scholarship has typically held that a er his Untimely Meditations which followed soon a er, Nietzsche's philosophy took a sharply individualist turn-an interpretation largely due to Walter Kaufmann's noble and in uential e ort to counter the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche by stressing Nietzsche's anti-political individualism and downplaying his seemingly more noxious Kulturphilosophie. But even a er Nietzsche gave up on the idea of German culture as something blessed with inner truth and greatness and pregnant with the potential for renewed splendor-heaping scorn instead on the Germans and their newlyfounded Reich-he still, I argue, continued to take culture, as a collective social achievement, to be something of prime importance. Indeed, it is for this reason that he took the ourishing of great individuals-especially artists and intellectuals-to be vital. eir singularity and their excellence redeems the decadent cultural landscape from the bovine blight of the "last man" and the self-satis ed, uncreative, and barren mediocrity he represents. My dissertation uses Nietzsche's perfectionistic ideal of a ourishing culture as a point of departure for investigating many of the central themes in his work: his criticism of the ideals enshrined in conventional morality; his attack on Christianity; his celebration of individual human excellence and cultural accomplishment; his lamentations about cultural decline; his troubling remarks about the need for slavery ("in some sense or other") if a society is to ourish; and his grand ambitions for a "revaluation of all values." i
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