Book Description

This timely book examines the complex and varied relations between educational institutions and societies at war. Drawn from the pages of the Harvard Educational Review, the essays provide multiple perspectives on how educational institutions support and oppose wartime efforts. As the editors of the volume note, the book reveals how people swept up in wars "reconsider and reshape education to reflect or resist the commitments, ideals, structures, and effects of wartime. Constituents use educational institutions to disseminate and reproduce dominant ideologies or to empower and inspire those marginalized; or to simultaneously promote both oppression and liberation." The first half of the book explores how students, educators, and communities work within established educational systems to reinforce existing conditions or to promote change. By working through such institutions, these individual sand groups use education to enact, transmit, or resist ideologies. The book's second half looks at how students, educators, and communities work around or beyond existing school systems to promote political and social transformation and to create new educational opportunities in response to conflict. These practices include efforts to create new educational systems featuring alternative curricula, broader access, and improved educational equity. A wide-ranging volume that addresses issues of vital importance within the United States and throughout the world, Education and War fills a crucial void in our understanding of education and its critical role in society. Contributors include Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Charles J. Beirne, S.J., Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz, Fernando Cardenal, S.J., Jocelyn Anne Glazier, Jonathan David Jansen, Susan M. Kardos, Christopher Kruegler, John E. Mack, M.D., Khalil Mahshi, Valerie Miller, Mokubung O. Nkomo, Patricia Parkman, Asgedet Stefanos, David Tyack.