Author : James Wilson
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 20,26 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 : L. Robert Stevens
Publisher :
Page : 560 pages
File Size : 17,41 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Education
ISBN :
Allan Blooms’ book, The Closing of the American Mind, reopened the debate on the value of a classic learning curriculum. In recent years the Classic Learning Core and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Texas have sponsored national conferences on the core and the curriculum. The articles which appear here are among the papers presented to those conferences. The Classic Learning Core is a distinguished curriculum for integrating the humanities requirements into a coherent sequence, a program which has been cited by the former Secretary of Education as one of four programs in the country leading to renewal in general education. It emphasizes the underlying units of knowledge, the study of class and classical books and documents, critical and creative thinking, and a thorough mastery of reading, writing, and speaking skills. This curriculum forms a coherent background in the greatest traditions of Western civilization. Topics covered include the history and development of the liberal arts, pros and cons of the core curriculum, advantages and disadvantages of teaching the great books, the role of the liberal arts in a pluralist society, the contents of the core curriculum and pedagogy.
Author : Roosevelt Montas
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 23,62 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 : 38,34 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 : 12,81 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 : 273 pages
File Size : 41,13 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 : 26,30 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 : Michael Nelson
Publisher : Jossey-Bass
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 45,51 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 : 16,67 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 : Richard M. Freeland
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 30,51 MB
Release : 1992
Category : Education, Higher
ISBN : 0195054644
This book examines the evolution of American universities during the years following World War II. Emphasizing the importance of change at the campus level, the book combines a general consideration of national trends with a close study of eight diverse universities in Massachusetts. Theeight are Harvard, M.I.T., Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts. Broad analytic chapters examine major developments like expansion, the rise of graduate education and research, the professionalization of the faculty, and the decline ofgeneral education. These chapters also review criticisms of academia that arose in the late 1960s and the fate of various reform proposals during the 1970s. Additional chapters focus on the eight campuses to illustrate the forces that drove different kinds of institutions--research universities,college-centered universities, urban private universities and public universities--in responding to the circumstances of the postwar years.
