Author : James Wilson
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 12,99 MB
Release :
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781412837071
Tells us who we are, where we live, how fast we are growing, what languages we speak, what religions we practice and more by imagining the whole world is a village of 100 people.
Author : Roosevelt Montas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 30,65 MB
Release : 2023-03-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0691224390
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.
Author : Peter Wood
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 24,1 MB
Release : 2015-09-28
Category :
ISBN : 9780985208691
For the first time in history Americans face the prospect of a unified set of national standards for K-12 education. While this goal sounds reasonable, and Common Core has been presented as a state-led effort, it is anything but. This book analyzes Common Core from the standpoint of its deleterious effects on curriculum--language arts, mathematics, history, and more--as well as its questionable legality, its roots in the aggressive spending of a few wealthy donors, its often-underestimated costs, and the untold damage it will wreak on American higher education. At a time when more and more people are questioning the wisdom of federally-mandated one-size-fits-all solutions, Drilling through the Core offers well-considered arguments for stopping Common Core in its tracks.
Author : Nicholas Tampio
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 49,80 MB
Release : 2018-03-01
Category : Education
ISBN : 1421424649
How the Common Core standardizes our kids’ education—and how it threatens our democracy. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is one of the most controversial pieces of education policy to emerge in decades. Detailing what and when K–12 students should be taught, it has led to expensive reforms and displaced other valuable ways to educate children. In this nuanced and provocative book, Nicholas Tampio argues that, though national standards can raise the education bar for some students, the democratic costs outweigh the benefits. To make his case, Tampio describes the history, philosophy, content, and controversy surrounding the Common Core standards for English language arts and math. He also explains and critiques the Next Generation Science Standards, the Advanced Placement US History curriculum framework, and the National Sexuality Education Standards. Though each set of standards has admirable elements, Tampio asserts that democracies should disperse education authority rather than entrust one political or pedagogical faction to decide the country’s entire philosophy of education. Ultimately, this lively and accessible book presents a compelling case that the greater threat to democratic education comes from centralized government control rather than from local education authorities.
Author : Eric Adler
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 28,29 MB
Release : 2020-09-04
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 019751880X
These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education.
Author : Wai Chee Dimock
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 23,46 MB
Release : 2008-10-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1400829526
What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations." This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock's sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature. Inspired by an unorthodox archive--ranging from epic traditions in Akkadian and Sanskrit to folk art, paintings by Veronese and Tiepolo, and the music of the Grateful Dead--Dimock constructs a long history of the world, a history she calls "deep time." The civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China, and West Africa, as well as Europe, leave their mark on American literature, which looks dramatically different when it is removed from a strictly national or English-language context. Key authors such as Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder, Leslie Silko, Gloria Naylor, and Gerald Vizenor are transformed in this light. Emerson emerges as a translator of Islamic culture; Henry James's novels become long-distance kin to Gilgamesh; and Black English loses its ungrammaticalness when reclassified as a creole tongue, meshing the input from Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Throughout, Dimock contends that American literature is answerable not to the nation-state, but to the human species as a whole, and that it looks dramatically different when removed from a strictly national or English-language context.
Author : Christopher A. Perrin
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 22,53 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Classical education
ISBN : 9781600510205
This book is an ideal introduction to classical education written by the headmaster of an established classical academy. It traces the history of classical education and describes its modern renaissance. The book also highlights the distinctive elements of the movement including its emphasis on teaching grammar, logic and rhetoric (the Trivium), and the extraordinary achievements of students who are receiving a classical education. Other sections address the role and benefit of classical language study (Latin and Greek) and integrated learning through a study of the great books of western civilization. The book is written in a colloquial, engaging style, with several anecdotes, diagrams and charts. This book is especially recommended to parents just beginning their examination of classical education. We have priced this booklet (and the Audio CD) very low so that schools and co-ops can affordably distribute it to parents. We encourage homeschoolers to give this booklet to other parents who may wish to consider classical education.
Author : Michael Nelson
Publisher : Jossey-Bass
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 32,40 MB
Release : 2000-04-06
Category : Education
ISBN :
"The humanities core is back from the dead. Indeed, it is vibrant at increasing numbers of institutions that take seriously--and not just as a cliche--what it means to prepare students for 'living in the twenty-first century.' Those who are forward-thinking will find thoughtful assessments of the most successful programs today." —Jeffrey Wallin, president, The American Academy for Liberal Education "Liberal education assures the well-being of society by providing both historical perspective and the mental agility required to navigate change. This heartening book shows a range of ways by which leading colleges and universities are meeting this critical challenge." —Susan Ford Wiltshire, professor and chair, Classical Studies, Vanderbilt University This book joins the critical debate on humanities education and asks what higher education must do to encourage greater breadth of knowledge, improved critical thinking skills, and lifelong competence in students. Alive at the Core explores the importance of general education in the humanities, lays the foundation for meaningful learning, and offers different approaches to changing the core curriculum into a tool for lifelong learning. Drawing from thirteen colleges and universities, each chapter examines a creative humanities program--detailing strategies used to develop cross-disciplinary models of learning. The authors describe how each program began, how it changed, how students connected their knowledge to the world outside the classroom, how computer-based educational technology was integrated, and how faculty members were recruited and became motivated to teach in the program.
Author : Myung Mi Kim
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 121 pages
File Size : 25,95 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0520231317
"The poems in Commons are at once global and intensely personal and emotional. An immensely talented poet, Myung Mi Kim loves language - its internal rhymes, alliterations, and diverse rhythms. Caught off guard by the beauty and precision of Kim's language and the exquisite images she so deftly conjures, we are drawn unwittingly into a web of fragmentary memories that subvert what we think we know about the violent history that haunts her and never ceases to demand recognition."--Elaine Kim, author of Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, and co-editor of Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism
Author : Christopher Perrin
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 15,14 MB
Release : 2008-08
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9781600510359
"The famous Grecian Urn of Achilles has been stolen ... The Greek alphabet is the key to decoding the clues and recovering the stolen treasure. Learn all of the Greek letters from alpha to omega along with their phonetic pronunciation. Decipher the encoded clues from witnesses to discover the identity of the thief and to trace the escape route. You will learn to to sound out English words with the Greek alphabet and you will even be able to write in your own Greek-letter code"--Page 4 of cover
