The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The Death and Life of the Great American School System
Author: Diane Ravitch
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010-03-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0465014917

Discusses how school choice, misapplied standards of accountability, the No Child Left Behind mandate, and the use of a corporate model have all led to a decline in public education and presents arguments for a return to strong neighborhood schools and quality teaching.

College Student Death

College Student Death
Author: Rosa Cintrón
Publisher: American College Personnel Association Series
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2007
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Every year thousands of college students die, leaving our campuses stunned and bereft. In the midst of crisis, it may be necessary to react quickly to their deaths, but appropriate responses can be accomplished through thoughtful preparation. From those who have weathered the deaths of their students, it is possible to adapt strategies that are compassionate, ethical, appropriate, and that reflect well on the campus. College Student Death: Guidelines for a Caring Campus is the result of many years of collaboration with more than thirty contributors. It applies the knowledge of university personnel called upon to respond to student death on and off campus and to provide solace to family and the campus community. This book provides support to university staff in the immediacy of student death, guides the design of policy before a crisis occurs, and provides instructional considerations for faculty. It enables the campus professional in understanding the complexities of effective response to college students' death and choosing an appropriate course. College student death affects the depth and breadth of the campus community. Members of innumerable campus units--including student affairs, housing, counseling centers, police departments, international programs, student life, legal affairs, administrative affairs, drug and alcohol centers, health centers, religious communities, and athletic departments--can benefit from this book.

Philosophy's Higher Education

Philosophy's Higher Education
Author: Nigel Tubbs
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2006-01-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1402023480

At about the age of 13 I began to realise that my formal education was separating itself off from my philosophical education. Of course, at the time I did not know it in this way. I experienced it as a split between what I was being taught and my experience of what I was being taught. It was, I now know, the philosophical experience of formal schooling. It was not until beginning the study of sociology at 16 that I came across the idea of dualisms—pairs of opposites that always appeared together but were never reconciled. In sociology it was the dualism of the individual and society. The question most asked in our classes was always regarding which aspect of the dualism dominated the other. The answer we always leaned towards was that both were mutually affected by the other. The answer seemed to lie somewhere in the middle. It was only at university, first as an undergraduate and then as a postgraduate, that I came across the idea of the dialectic. Slowly I began to recognise that the dualisms which plagued social theory—I and we, self and other, good and evil, modernity and post-modernity, autonomy and heteronomy, freedom and nature, truth and relativism, and so many more—were not only dialectical in being thought about, but also that the thought of them being dialectical had an even stranger quality. It was the same experience as being at school.

The Death Class

The Death Class
Author: Erika Hayasaki
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451642954

The poignant, “powerful” (The Boston Globe) look at how to appreciate life from an extraordinary professor who teaches about death: “Poetic passages and assorted revelations you’ll likely not forget” (Chicago Tribune). Why does a college course on death have a three-year waiting list? When nurse Norma Bowe decided to teach a course on death at a college in New Jersey, she never expected it to be popular. But year after year students crowd into her classroom, and the reason is clear: Norma’s “death class” is really about how to make the most of what poet Mary Oliver famously called our “one wild and precious life.” Under the guise of discussions about last wills and last breaths and visits to cemeteries and crematoriums, Norma teaches her students to find grace in one another. In The Death Class, award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki followed Norma for more than four years, showing how she steers four extraordinary students from their tormented families and neighborhoods toward happiness: she rescues one young woman from her suicidal mother, helps a young man manage his schizophrenic brother, and inspires another to leave his gang life behind. Through this unorthodox class on death, Norma helps kids who are barely hanging on to understand not only the value of their own lives, but also the secret of fulfillment: to throw yourself into helping others. Hayasaki’s expert reporting and literary prose bring Norma’s wisdom out of the classroom, transforming it into an inspiring lesson for all. In the end, Norma’s very own life—and how she lives it—is the lecture that sticks. “Readers will come away struck by Bowe’s compassion—and by the unexpectedly life-affirming messages of courage that spring from her students’ harrowing experiences” (Entertainment Weekly).

Underworld Lit

Underworld Lit
Author: Srikanth Reddy
Publisher: Wave Books
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1950268217

Simultaneously funny and frightful, Srikanth Reddy's Underworld Lit is a multiverse quest through various cultures' realms of the dead. Couched in a literature professor's daily mishaps with family life and his sudden reckoning with mortality, this adventurous serial prose poem moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.

The Life and Death of Secondary Education for All

The Life and Death of Secondary Education for All
Author: Richard Pring
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1136211756

Is there life after death for secondary education? This book focuses upon the quality of learning. ‘Reform’, so called, too often begins with qualifications, examinations, institutional provision, paths of progression. All those are very important, but their value lies in the support they give to learners and their learning in its different forms. One needs to start with the aims of education and then with what it means to learn (practically, theoretically, morally) and with the very many different needs of the learners. That is what this book aims to do. In so doing, it will be both philosophical in analysis and empirical in example. So much is happening ‘from down below’ that goes unrecognised by policy makers. But innovations too often get hampered by government interventions, by a bureaucratic mentality and by failure to spread good practice. The general argument of the book, therefore, will be illustrated throughout with detailed references to practical developments in schools, colleges, the third sector, youth work, independent training providers and professional bodies – across several countries. The book builds on Education for All, which was based on 14-19 research into secondary education, this book transcends the particularities of England and Wales and digs more deeply into those issues which are at the heart of educational controversy, policy and practices and which survive the transience of political change and controversy. The issues (the aims of education, standards of performance, the consequent vision of learning, the role of teachers, progression from school to higher or further education and into employment, the provision of such education and training and the control of education) are by no means confined to the UK, or to this day and age. Pring identifies similar problems in other countries such as the USA, Germany and France – and indeed in the Greece of Plato and Aristotle and offers solutions with a comparative perspective. It is a critical time. Old patterns of education and its provision are less and less suitable for facing the twenty-first century. The patterns and modes of communication have changed radically in a few years and those changes are quickening in pace. The economic context has been transformed, affecting the skills and knowledge needed for employment. The social world of young people raises fresh demands, hopes and fears. A global recession has affected young people disproportionately making quality of life and self-fulfilment ever more difficult to attain. In addressing ‘learning’ and the ‘learners’ first and foremost, the book will argue for a wider vision of learning and a more varied pattern of provision. Old structures must give way to new.

Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education

Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education
Author: Petra Mikulan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1003821952

This volume argues that refusal is a viable political ethics in education. It is an ethics that allows space for new possibilities to emerge, with the potential to enrich higher education study and pedagogies in the future. Chapters examine the ethical, epistemological, political and affective premises of refusing the colonial university, and reflect upon what refusal means for higher education decolonization across international settings. Refusal marks a political ethos and praxis that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics, while asserting diverse sovereignties and lifeworlds. Whereas resistance may reinscribe the weakness of the colonized in the power relations with the colonizer, refusal interrupts the smooth operation of power relations, denying the authority of the settler state and remaking the rules of engagement. It is a political stance and action that denies the very legitimacy of power over the subjugated. This collection views refusal not as an end in itself, nor as a mode of critique, but as a necessary first step for educators and students in higher education to invest in the idea of radically different modes of futurity. It explores how educators and students in higher education can invent pedagogies of refusal that function ethically, affectively and politically, and asks: What do pedagogies of refusal look like? How might western universities sustain and support refusal, rather than discipline it? What assumptions are sustained by ruling out certain educational futures as out of bounds, or impossible? This book will be important reading for researchers, scholars and educators in Decolonizing Education, Higher Education Transformation, and Philosophy of Education. It will also be valuable to policymakers and activists who are considering how refusal might be carried out within and outside institutions.

Life and Death in the Third Reich

Life and Death in the Third Reich
Author: Peter Fritzsche
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2009-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674254015

On January 30, 1933, hearing about the celebrations for Hitler’s assumption of power, Erich Ebermayer remarked bitterly in his diary, “We are the losers, definitely the losers.” Learning of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which made Jews non-citizens, he raged, “hate is sown a million-fold.” Yet in March 1938, he wept for joy at the Anschluss with Austria: “Not to want it just because it has been achieved by Hitler would be folly.” In a masterful work, Peter Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. The goal was to create a new national and racial self-consciousness among Germans. For Germany to live, others—especially Jews—had to die. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life. Fritzsche examines the efforts of Germans to adjust to new racial identities, to believe in the necessity of war, to accept the dynamic of unconditional destruction—in short, to become Nazis. Powerful and provocative, Life and Death in the Third Reich is a chilling portrait of how ideology takes hold.

Well Worth Saving

Well Worth Saving
Author: Laurel Leff
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-12-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0300243871

"A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe. The United States' role in saving Europe's intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not. To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed "not worth saving" and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era."--Provided by publisher.