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Public spending on education is under attack. In this challenging book Aronowitz and Giroux examine the thinking behind that attack, in the USA and in other industrialized countries.
In Education under Siege, Peter Mortimore considers the UK education system as it is and as it might be. Concluding that the United Kingdom has some of the best teachers in the world but one of the most muddled systems, Mortimore proposes radical changes to help all British schools become good schools. He argues that the government should outlaw selection practices, integrate private schools into the state system, and establish processes to ensure that each school has effective teachers and a fair balance of students who learn easily and those who do not. In a concluding call to action, he asks readers who share his concerns to demand that politicians alter the course of education policy.
Public Education Under Siege argues for a democratic and egalitarian alternative to the test-driven, market-oriented core of current education reform. These short, jargon-free essays cover public policy, teacher unions, economic inequality, race, language diversity, parent involvement, and leadership.
Over the last fifteen years, Pakistan has come to be defined exclusively in terms of its struggle with terror. But are ordinary Pakistanis extremists? And what explains how Pakistanis think? Much of the current work on extremism in Pakistan tends to study extremist trends in the country from a detached position—a top-down security perspective, that renders a one-dimensional picture of what is at its heart a complex, richly textured country of 200 million people. In this book, using rigorous analysis of survey data, in-depth interviews in schools and universities in Pakistan, historical narrative reporting, and her own intuitive understanding of the country, Madiha Afzal gives the full picture of Pakistan’s relationship with extremism. The author lays out Pakistanis’ own views on terrorist groups, on jihad, on religious minorities and non-Muslims, on America, and on their place in the world. The views are not radical at first glance, but are riddled with conspiracy theories. Afzal explains how the two pillars that define the Pakistani state—Islam and a paranoia about India—have led to a regressive form of Islamization in Pakistan’s narratives, laws, and curricula. These, in turn, have shaped its citizens’ attitudes. Afzal traces this outlook to Pakistan’s unique and tortured birth. She examines the rhetoric and the strategic actions of three actors in Pakistani politics—the military, the civilian governments, and the Islamist parties—and their relationships with militant groups. She shows how regressive Pakistani laws instituted in the 1980s worsened citizen attitudes and led to vigilante and mob violence. The author also explains that the educational regime has become a vital element in shaping citizens’ thinking. How many years one attends school, whether the school is public, private, or a madrassa, and what curricula is followed all affect Pakistanis’ attitudes about terrorism and the rest of the world. In the end, Afzal suggests how this beleaguered nation—one with seemingly insurmountable problems in governance and education—can change course.
Public spending on education is under attack. In this challenging book Aronowitz and Giroux examine the thinking behind that attack, in the USA and in other industrialized countries.
2007 Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) Book Award Complete List of Authors:Dorothy Holland, Donald M. Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Marla Frederick-McGlathery, Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, and Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. What is the state of democracy at the turn of the twenty-first century? To answer this question, seven scholars lived for a year in five North Carolina communities. They observed public meetings of all sorts, had informal and formal interviews with people, and listened as people conversed with each other at bus stops and barbershops, soccer games and workplaces. Their collaborative ethnography allows us to understand how diverse members of a community not just the elite think about and experience “politics” in ways that include much more than merely voting. This book illustrates how the social and economic changes of the last three decades have made some new routes to active democratic participation possible while making others more difficult. Local Democracy Under Siege suggests how we can account for the current limitations of U.S. democracy and how remedies can be created that ensure more meaningful participation by a greater range of people. Complete List of Authors (pictured) From Left to Right, bottom row: Enrique Murillo, Jr., Thaddeus Guldbrandsen, Marla Frederick-McGlathery. Top row: Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, and Don Nonini.
Cultural differences are not asserted through the specificity of dominant notions of race, gender, and class, but through a commitment to expanding dialogue and exchange across cultural lines as part of a wider attempt to deepen and develop democratic public life. This revised edition of the 1985 best-seller speaks eloquently to the need to attend to ever-present inequalities of education in the light of new political correctness, technology, and curricula.
Noted clinical psychologist Robert Firestone and his co-authors explore the struggle that all of us face in striving to retain a sense of ourselves as unique individuals.
The story of the Warsaw ghetto is one of the most tragic episodes in the Second World War. Using a so-called "threat of typhus" as their "scientific" justification for quarantine, the Nazis crammed almost a half million Jews into a small quarter of the city, depriving them of food, clean water, adequate sanitation, and medical supplies. For three years, from 1940 to 1943, the ghetto inhabitants were packed seven or more to a room, struggling incessantly against starvation, disease, and death. Of the 400,000 Jews in Warsaw before the war, only a few thousand survived. In Courage Under Siege, Charles Roland, a physician and historian, provides the first history of the medical disaster that took place in the Warsaw ghetto, offering a compassionate account of the tragic struggle for life and, in particular, of the heroic efforts of the ghetto's doctors, nurses, and social organizations who provided relief in the face of overwhelming odds. He portrays the nightmarish conditions of the hospitals where operations continued without electricity, gas, running water or sewage systems, where corpses lined the corridors, and where beds contained as many as three patients at a time. He describes the ingenuity and humanity of doctors and hospital workers who continued to provide medical services while they themselves were starving and facing the same destiny as the rest of the ghetto inhabitants. Heart-wrenching, inspirational stories of these dedicated medical workers shine brightly in this otherwise bleak landscape. For instance, Roland describes the creation of a clandestine medical school, "a beautiful case of passive resistance," which gave as many as 500 students a medical education and a semblance of normal living--though only a few survived to continue their training. And Roland also tells of a major scientific study of hunger conducted by ghetto physicians capitalizing on the one thing they had in abundance--starvation. This was research of the purest kind, intended to advance human knowledge, since these doctors had no illusions that the research would help them or their patients survive. Drawing on an impressive array of research materials as well as interviews with surviving medical workers, Roland draws a stunning portrait of how the medical community of the Warsaw ghetto resisted the ravages of disease and starvation inflicted by the Nazis. This volume is a lasting testimony to their courage and to the power of the human spirit in the face of horror and adversity.
