Education, Education, Education is The Wardrobe Ensemble's inventively theatrical and irreverently funny love letter to the British schools of the 1990s that asks big questions about a country in special measures, exploring what we are taught and why, and where responsibility lies.
Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense—The Case against Education points the way.
In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.
Education is a contested topic, and not just politically. For years scholars have approached it from two different points of view: one empirical, focused on explanations for student and school success and failure, and the other philosophical, focused on education’s value and purpose within the larger society. Rarely have these separate approaches been brought into the same conversation. Education, Justice, and Democracy does just that, offering an intensive discussion by highly respected scholars across empirical and philosophical disciplines. The contributors explore how the institutions and practices of education can support democracy, by creating the conditions for equal citizenship and egalitarian empowerment, and how they can advance justice, by securing social mobility and cultivating the talents and interests of every individual. Then the authors evaluate constraints on achieving the goals of democracy and justice in the educational arena and identify strategies that we can employ to work through or around those constraints. More than a thorough compendium on a timely and contested topic, Education, Justice, and Democracy exhibits an entirely new, more deeply composed way of thinking about education as a whole and its importance to a good society.
James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.
Volumes have been written about the value of more and better education. But is there sufficient evidence to support the commonly held belief that we, as individuals and as a community, should be investing more in education? This book explores that question in unprecedented detail, drawing on empirical evidence from an impressive array of sources. While much of the focus is on the educational system in the United Kingdom, the book offers lessons of international applicability. A state-of-the-art compendium on education policy and its impact on educational attainment, the book examines numerous large-scale data sources on individual pupils and schools. The questions the book considers are far-ranging: How much do teachers matter for children's educational attainment? What payoff do people get from acquiring more education when they enter the labor market? How well do education systems function to provide employers with the skills they want? The book concludes by issuing some strong policy recommendations and offering an evaluation of what does and does not work in improving educational attainment. The recommendations address such issues as school effectiveness, education financing, individual investment in education, government education initiatives, higher education, labor market rewards, and lifelong learning.
. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.
A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair once said that his three priorities were 'education, education, education'. Here, one of the architects of these reforms describes his quest to transform the standards and opportunities available to pupils in English schools.