Jane Elliott: A Class Divided

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE's history. It is about an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives.

The 1985 National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational, Cultural, or Historical Programming

Sidney Hillman Prize Award (1985)

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The Presumption of Rationality: Psychological Challenges to Legal Certainty

A roundtable discussion concerning, but not limited to, the following themes:

Rationality has long prevailed as the dominant model of individual decision making in law. For the most part, legal rules assume that people act rationally and that most individual behavior is the product of reasoned choice. What this dominant model of individual decision making ignores is the fundamental role of imagination in individual thought and behavior. In his seminal 1930 book, Law and the Modern Mind, Jerome Frank drew on psychoanalytic ideas about imagination in describing the distorting effects of infantile wishes and fantasies on the decision making of legal actors and judges. More recently, legal thinkers and judges, including David Bazelon, Peter Brooks, and Martha Nussbaum, have applied psychoanalytic and related ideas about imagination to particular legal problems. This roundtable takes a step back to consider more broadly the interplay between law and imagination. What would it mean for law to take seriously the idea of imagination? How do we reconcile the law's emphasis on objective behavior with a psychodynamic understanding of unconscious fantasy? How does a focus on imagination threaten the liberal legal ideal of the rational, autonomous individual? Does imagination inevitably lead us toward a more romantic, but arguably more authoritarian and less democratic, vision of law?

Peter Brooks has recently joined the faculty of Princeton University as Mellon Visiting Professor, after many decades of teaching at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature. A recent recipient of the Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, he plans to lead a three-year seminar at Princeton's University Center for Human Values on "The Ethics of Reading and the Cultures of Professionalism." He is the author of a number of books, including Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, and The Melodramatic Imagination.

Anne Dailey is the Evangeline Starr Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Professor Dailey received her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her current research focuses on the application of psychoanalytic developmental psychology to modern conceptions of children's rights. She is the recipient of the 2003 CORST prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association, and recent Guest Editor for the Fall 2007 issue of American Imago, entitled "Legal Analysis."

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist, professor, and novelist. She was named by Time Magazine as one of 25 most influential Americans. Harvard University Press describes her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, as "the little book that started a revolution." Her first novel, Kyra, published in January 2008, was reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "a rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person's love story." In 2002, The Birth of Pleasure was described by the Times Literary Supplement as a "thrilling, new paradigm" and characterized by National Public Radio as the work of a psychologist who writes like a novelist. She is currently University Professor at New York University.

Nomi Stolzenberg is the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Law School. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including legal fictions, law and religion, law and liberalism, and the complex relations between property, community, and sovereignty. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, which involves scholars and students from throughout USC's campus. She is currently at work on two books on liberalism and religion in American law and culture, as well as several other research projects—one exploring the relationship between liberalism and romanticism, another examining the concept of "creating facts on the ground."

Kenji Yoshino is a Chaired Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. Educated at Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and Yale Law School, he taught at Yale Law School from 1998 to 2008, most recently as the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law. He has published in both academic journals, such as the Columbia Law Review and the Yale Law Journal, and in more popular media, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. His book, Covering: The HIdden Assault on our Civil Rights, was published in 2006. He is currently at work on his second book on Shakespeare and the law.

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One Laptop Per Child

"The mission of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege."

It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project

"In 2002, MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte experienced first-hand how connected laptops transformed the lives of children and their families in a remote Cambodian village. A seed was planted: If every child in the world had access to a computer, what potential could be unlocked? What problems could be solved? These questions eventually led to the foundation of One Laptop per Child, and the creation of the XO laptop."

"OLPC’s mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. While children are by nature eager for knowledge, many countries have insufficient resources to devote to education—sometimes less than $20 per year per child (compared to an average of $7,500 in the United States). By giving children their very own connected XO laptop, we are giving them a window to the outside world, access to vast amounts of information, a way to connect with each other, and a springboard into their future. And we’re also helping these countries develop an essential resource—educated, empowered children." (Info Here)

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace.

As a young child, Wallace and his family lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, Wallace moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school.

As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He attended his father's alma mater, Amherst College, and majored in English and philosophy, with a focus on modal logic and mathematics. His philosophy senior thesis on modal logic was awarded the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize, while his English senior thesis would later become his first novel. He graduated with summa cum laude honors for both theses in 1985. He next pursued a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Arizona, which he earned in 1987. (bio taken here)


"Artists on the Cutting Edge" [10/1997]

Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self

Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15, 1926. His student years seem to have been psychologically tormented but were intellectually brilliant. He became academically established during the 1960s, when he held a series of positions at French universities, before his election in 1969 to the ultra-prestigious Collège de France, where he was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought until his death. From the 1970s on, Foucault was very active politically. He was a founder of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons and often protested on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups. He frequently lectured outside France, particularly in the United States, and in 1983 had agreed to teach annually at the University of California at Berkeley. An early victim of AIDS, Foucault died in Paris on June 25, 1984. In addition to works published during his lifetime, his lectures at the Collège de France, being published posthumously, contain important elucidations and extensions of his ideas.

It can be difficult to think of Foucault as a philosopher. His academic formation was in psychology and its history as much as in philosophy, his books were mostly histories of medical and social sciences, his passions were literary and political. Nonetheless, almost all of Foucault's works can be fruitfully read as philosophical in either or both of two ways: as a carrying out of philosophy's traditional critical project in a new (historical) manner; and as a critical engagement with the thought of traditional philosophers. (bio taken here)

April 12, 1983: UC Berkeley Language Center:

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part I

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part II

The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part III

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community. The first, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in 1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the fundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work, action). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging). (bio taken here)

A two part series on the thought of Hanna Arendt, from the show Entitled Opinions, which is a weekly literary talk show that ranges broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience. The host, Robert Harrison, is the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University and is Chair of the Department of French and Italian, where he has been since 1985.

Guest: Karen Feldman teaches in the Departments of Rhetoric and German at UC Berkeley. Her areas of specialization include hermeneutics and phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, German Idealism, feminist theory, literary theory and aesthetics. She is the author of Binding Words: Conscience and Text in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2005) and co-editor of Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1998).

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Martha Nussbaum: Interview

University of Chicago: Professor Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department and the Political Science Department, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and Co-Chair of the Human Rights Program. She is the founder and Coordinator of the Center for Comparative Constitutionalism and Co-director of the Center for Laws, Philosophy, and Human Values. (Bio taken here)