Testing Wars in the Public Schools
Testing Wars in the Public Schools

Author: William J. Reese

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0674075676

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Despite claims that written exams narrowed the curriculum, ruined children’s health, and turned teachers into automatons, once tests took root in American schools their legitimacy was never seriously challenged. William Reese puts today’s battles over standards and benchmarks into perspective by showcasing the history of the pencil-and-paper exam.

Print News and Raise Hell
Print News and Raise Hell

Author: Kenneth Joel Zogry

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1469608308

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For over 125 years, the Daily Tar Heel has chronicled life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at times pushed and prodded the university community on issues of local, state, and national significance. Thousands of students have served on its staff, many of whom have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and other influential fields. Print News and Raise Hell engagingly narrates the story of the newspaper's development and the contributions of many of the people associated with it. Kenneth Joel Zogry shows how the paper has wrestled over the years with challenges to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, while confronting issues such as the evolution of race, gender, and sexual equality on campus and long-standing concerns about the role of major athletics at an institution of higher learning. The story of the paper, the social media platform of its day, uncovers many dramatic but perhaps forgotten events at UNC since the late nineteenth century, and along with many photographs and cartoons not published for decades, opens a fascinating window into Tar Heel history. Examining how the campus and the paper have dealt with many challenging issues for more than a century, Zogry reveals the ways in which the history of the Daily Tar Heel is deeply intertwined with the past and present of the nation's oldest public university.

Rescuing Socrates
Rescuing Socrates

Author: Roosevelt Montas

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0691224390

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A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.