Educated in Tyranny

Educated in Tyranny
Author: Maurie D. McInnis,Kirt von Daacke,Louis P. Nelson,Benjamin Ford
Publsiher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2019-08-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813942872

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From the University of Virginia’s very inception, slavery was deeply woven into its fabric. Enslaved people first helped to construct and then later lived in the Academical Village; they raised and prepared food, washed clothes, cleaned privies, and chopped wood. They maintained the buildings, cleaned classrooms, and served as personal servants to faculty and students. At any given time, there were typically more than one hundred enslaved people residing alongside the students, faculty, and their families. The central paradox at the heart of UVA is also that of the nation: What does it mean to have a public university established to preserve democratic rights that is likewise founded and maintained on the stolen labor of others? In Educated in Tyranny, Maurie McInnis, Louis Nelson, and a group of contributing authors tell the largely unknown story of slavery at the University of Virginia. While UVA has long been celebrated as fulfilling Jefferson’s desire to educate citizens to lead and govern, McInnis and Nelson document the burgeoning political rift over slavery as Jefferson tried to protect southern men from anti-slavery ideas in northern institutions. In uncovering this history, Educated in Tyranny changes how we see the university during its first fifty years and understand its history hereafter.

The Tyranny of the Meritocracy

The Tyranny of the Meritocracy
Author: Lani Guinier
Publsiher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2016-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780807078129

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A fresh and bold argument for revamping our standards of “merit” and a clear blueprint for creating collaborative education models that strengthen our democracy rather than privileging individual elites Standing on the foundations of America’s promise of equal opportunity, our universities purport to serve as engines of social mobility and practitioners of democracy. But as acclaimed scholar and pioneering civil rights advocate Lani Guinier argues, the merit systems that dictate the admissions practices of these institutions are functioning to select and privilege elite individuals rather than create learning communities geared to advance democratic societies. Having studied and taught at schools such as Harvard University, Yale Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Guinier has spent years examining the experiences of ethnic minorities and of women at the nation’s top institutions of higher education, and here she lays bare the practices that impede the stated missions of these schools. Goaded on by a contemporary culture that establishes value through ranking and sorting, universities assess applicants using the vocabulary of private, highly individualized merit. As a result of private merit standards and ever-increasing tuitions, our colleges and universities increasingly are failing in their mission to provide educational opportunity and to prepare students for productive and engaged citizenship. To reclaim higher education as a cornerstone of democracy, Guinier argues that institutions of higher learning must focus on admitting and educating a class of students who will be critical thinkers, active citizens, and publicly spirited leaders. Guinier presents a plan for considering “democratic merit,” a system that measures the success of higher education not by the personal qualities of the students who enter but by the work and service performed by the graduates who leave. Guinier goes on to offer vivid examples of communities that have developed effective learning strategies based not on an individual’s “merit” but on the collaborative strength of a group, learning and working together, supporting members, and evolving into powerful collectives. Examples are taken from across the country and include a wide range of approaches, each innovative and effective. Guinier argues for reformation, not only of the very premises of admissions practices but of the shape of higher education itself.

The Tyranny of Language in Education

The Tyranny of Language in Education
Author: Zubeida Mustafa
Publsiher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0199400717

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"Language is closely linked with a person's socialization. It is something that develops in a community. The culture, political thought, and sociological dimension of people living in a group have a direct relationship with the language bearing on the language they speak. That is why language is never regarded as something neutral, and the medium of instruction used in schools has far-reaching implications. It can facilitate the social, cultural, and intellectual development, or it can hurt the capacity to learn. Unfortunately, factors other than these obvious ones have determined the language to be used to teach a young child in Pakistan. The failure to look at language as a crucial component of education per se has resulted in our failure to spread literacy and learning in the country. Can we reform education in Pakistan using any language? No, says the author, who argues her case from a young child's perspective. Since the first edition of this book, a lot of research has been carried on this subject and should certainly create more awareness among educationists and policymakers, as well as parents. The author proposes the roles to be assigned to the mother tongue, the national language, and English, the international language of the day."--Publisher's website.

Thomas Jefferson s Education

Thomas Jefferson s Education
Author: Alan Taylor
Publsiher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780393652437

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From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university. In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.

Governing by Numbers

Governing by Numbers
Author: Stephen J. Ball
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2018-10-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9781351789387

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Social science researchers have become increasing attentive to the role of numbers in contemporary life. Issues around big data, national test results, and output and performance statistics are now routinely reported and debated in the media. Numbers are a powerful resource for governments as a means to manage and ‘improve’ their populations, and we are increasingly represented, organized and driven by an economy of numbers, which inserts itself into more and more aspects of our lives. This book critically addresses some of the ways in which numbers are deployed in educational governance and practice, and some of the consequences of this deployment for what it means to be educated, to teach, and to learn. Recognising that numbers do not simply represent, but that they change things and have real effects, allows us to move beyond a system where difficult and important issues about what we want from education and from teachers are side-stepped in the push to ‘improve our numbers’. This collection offers a set of starting points from which we might speak back to numbers, drawing on research to explore how numbers change the way we think about ourselves and what we do. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.

The Tyranny of Merit

The Tyranny of Merit
Author: Michael J. Sandel
Publsiher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780374720995

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A Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2020 A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020 A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020 A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020 The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.

Beyond the Tyranny of Testing

Beyond the Tyranny of Testing
Author: Kenneth J. Gergen,Scherto R. Gill
Publsiher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780190872779

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Measurement-based assessment has dominated our educational systems at the expense of the learning and the well-being of students and teachers. In this book, Gergen and Gill propose a radical alternative to this broken system, which is based instead on an inspirational conception of schools as sites of collective meaning-making and a relational orientation to evaluation. The authors acknowledge that it is within the process of relating that the world comes to be meaningful for us, and equally, learning and well-being are embedded in relational process, which testing and grades undermine. Providing detailed illustrations using cases from pioneering schools around the globe at both the primary and secondary level, this book demonstrates how a relational orientation to evaluation in education can enhance learning processes, foster students' engagement and vitality relationships, and elevate the evaluation of teaching and the school as a whole. Featuring collaborative learning, dialogic pedagogy, and flexible curricula, relational evaluation truly speaks to the demands of a rapidly changing world.

Slavery and the University

Slavery and the University
Author: Leslie M. Harris,James T. Campbell,Alfred L. Brophy
Publsiher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-02-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780820354446

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Slavery and the University is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.