Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future. In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern. An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society.    Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement. From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class. Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators. Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justify test-based policy has changed, the model used to produce test scores remains much the same. Therefore, so do the outcomes of test-based policies, which continue to reproduce and reinforce the existing social hierarchy of the United States.   The hope of equity lies in educators charting new paths and scholars around the world who are dreaming new educational paradigms into being. Ultimately, Warren invites policymakers, educators, and parents to explore the richness of possibility when education is designed around the belief that every child is worthy of the opportunity to thrive.

Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching Black Life and Literature presents the experiences and voices of Black creative writers who are also teachers. The authors presented here write and teach across a variety of genres and at numerous intersections, including writers of poetry, fiction, experimental fiction, playwriting, and also from creative writers who are engaged in literary studies and criticism. Contributors from this book provide practical advice, engage with historical and theoretical questions about teaching in classrooms, workshops, and community settings. Teaching Black is for teachers and students of literature and craft in high schools, colleges, community settings, and workshops. This book is an invaluable tool for teachers, practitioners, presses, organizational leaders, and change agents who are interested in providing access to, and incorporating Black literature and conversations on Black literary craft into their own work.

This book reports not only a didactic experience but also research, offering a training model on peace mediation. The female protagonists of this research experience the role of trainers of other compatriots through a new didactic model. Compared to other books, the volume proposes for the first time a reflection of research - action on the themes of peace, security of the female gender.   The peculiarity of this book is to propose a research path that looks at the future prospects of women as expert teachers of mediation and integration processes.  

Socialization in childhood and at a young age is marked, not only by measurable factors such as age, sex, ethnic group, religion or parents’ income, but also by variables such as depression, aggressiveness, inner calm or serenity. It makes all the difference whether a child experiences during their development an atmosphere of acceptance, gladness and emotional warmth, or one of depreciation, indifference and emotional coldness. The atmosphere in which a child is brought up shapes them as people, at least as much as the measurable factors of their social context. By discussing in detail how the atmosphere in the family, the kindergarten or at school can affect a child’s well-being, this book calls for the importance of shaping such atmospheres so to produce a positive influence on children living and learning together.

In Didactic Classroom Studies a group of researchers from the University of Gothenburg who are working in the Scandinavian didactics' tradition show how pupil perspectives, teacher priorities, content and context interrelate, and have different didactical consequences for teaching and learning. Using practical examples the authors examine the nature of classroom work at various levels of education and in the full range of subject areas, including mathematics, science, languages, social science, and home economics. The editors then single out the importance of classroom studies as a potential research direction in didactic studies. Finally, the essays are placed in an international and historical context by Professor Kirsti Klette, University of Oslo. The authors of this volume - all active at the Department of Pedagogical, Curricular and Professional Studies - set out to show the strong contribution made by classroom studies to didactic research. At the same time, their empirical studies contribute concretely to the further development of didactic classroom studies as a research area.

In Wesleyan University, 1910 - 1970, David B. Potts presents an engaging story that includes a measured departure from denominational identity, an enterprising acquisition of fabulous wealth, and a burst of enthusiastic aspirations that initiated an era of financial stress. Threaded through these episodes is a commitment to social service that is rooted in Methodism and clothed in more humanistic garb after World War II.Potts gives an unprecedented level of attention to the board of trustees and finances. These closely related components are now clearly introduced as major shaping forces in the development of American higher education. Extensive examination is also given to student and faculty roles in building and altering institutional identity. Threaded throughout these probes within in the analytical narrative is a close look at the waxing and waning of presidential leadership. All these developments, as is particularly evident in the areas of student demography and faculty compensation, travel on a pathway through middle-class America. Within this broad context, Wesleyan becomes a window on how the nation's liberal arts colleges survived and thrived during the last century. This book concludes the author's analysis of changes in institutional identities that shaped the narrative for his widely praised first volume, Wesleyan University, 1831 - 1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England. His current fully evidenced sequel supplies helpful insights and reference points as we encounter the present fiscal strain in higher education and the related debates on institutional mission.

Education in Kentucky has developed slowly, and even now the state ranks low in the nation in providing public funds for the development of its human resources. In this book the author, who was president of the University of Kentucky from 1917 to 1940, traces the tortuous path of education in the state from the pioneer log schoolhouse to the modern universities of Kentucky and Louisville.

A distinguished educator and social critic here considers the demands put upon democratic and progressive policies in education, which remains, he believes, man's strongest hope for creating new bases for human values in an age of change and cultural crisis. The importance of human worth and individual advancement, within communities and varied age demographics, is analyzed.

This book deals with the multiple problem of education in the public schools as it relates to moral and spiritual values. The author cuts a wide swath through the tangled underbrush of church and state, religion and education, sacred and secular, spiritual and materialistic, "body and soul," and lets in a lot of light. To these problems the author brings a lifetime of courageous reflection and experience. To them he also brings, as case studies, the actual experiences of actual children and teachers in actual classrooms in Kentucky, where an experimental program of education in moral and spiritual values has been in process for the past several years.

and racial justice during a critical era in southern and Appalachian history. This volume is the first comprehensive examination of that extraordinary -- and often controversial -- institution. Founded in 1932 by Myles Horton and Don West near Monteagle, Tennessee, this adult education center was both a vital resource for southern radicals and a catalyst for several major movements for social change. During its thirty-year history it served as a community folk school, as a training center for southern labor and Farmers' Union members, and as a meeting place for black and white civil rights activists. As a result of the civil rights involvement, the state of Tennessee revoked the charter of the original institution in 1962. At the heart of Horton's philosophy and the Highlander program was a belief in the power of education to effect profound changes in society. By working with the knowledge the poor of Appalachia and the South had gained from their experiences, Horton and his staff expected to enable them to take control of their own lives and to solve their own problems. John M. Glen's authoritative study is more than the story of a singular school in Tennessee. It is a biography of Myles Horton, co-founder and long-time educational director of the school, whose social theories shaped its character. It is an analysis of the application of a particular idea of adult education to the problems of the South and of Appalachia. And it affords valuable insights into the history of the southern labor and the civil rights movements and of the individuals and institutions involved in them over the past five decades.

The name Albert Kirwan is inextricably bound with the University of Kentucky -- in sports, scholarship, and administration. His skills and interests were so many and varied that his accomplishments in one area could not long satisfy his restless nature; he captained and later coached the U.K. Wildcats, took degrees in law and history, wrote or edited six books, taught a full load of classes, became dean of students, graduate dean, and finally, was unanimously installed as seventh president of the University. Under his guidance, the UK graduate program was improved and strengthened; he presented the University's case before the National Collegiate Athletic Association council concerning the 1948--49 basketball gambling scandals; he helped to see the University through its first tense period of integration; and he was able to handle student activism in the 1960s with both courage and understanding. Beyond this, he was a gentle, devoted family man. His wife, Betty, his sons, and his sister have shared their memories of Albert Kirwan, providing much of the material included in the biographical section of this book; and Kirwan himself left a tape, "Some Memories of My Life," recorded in 1971, which Frank Mathias has blended with information culled from letters, files, and interviews. During his lifetime, Albert Kirwan was often invited to speak before historical associations, at commencement exercises, athletic assemblies, on television, and on radio. Records of these speeches document his far-ranging thoughts on history, education, athletics, politics, the South, the Civil War, and civil rights, revealing him as a responsible and responsive liberal Kentucky gentleman. He was a man of many moods, and had a wry, tongue-in-cheek humor that enlivened his lectures and talks. The second section of the book is a selection of his speeches, letters, and excerpts from his articles and books, including a chapter from John ]. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union, which won the Sydnor award. Reproduced here are Kirwan's analysis of the Kentucky court struggle of the 1820s and his statement before the Southeastern Conference on the penalty assessed against Kentucky's basketball team; and, here too are the more casual banquet speeches, the bantering affection of a warm, sensitive man among friends. "Here is a man who has given his whole life to [the University of Kentucky]," Happy Chandler said of him, "... surely he must love it as perhaps no other person could."

Since its establishment in 1965 the National Endowment for the Humanities has distributed many millions of dollars in grants. Has the money been well spent? What impact have the Endowment's programs had on the academic community, the schools, and the public at large? In this first book-length study of the Endowment, Stephen Miller offers a trenchant analysis of the agency's origins, its accomplishments, and the criticisms leveled against it. In the political maneuvering that led to its establishment, Miller sees a basic misunderstanding between those in academia who lobbied for NEH and those in Congress who were its most enthusiastic supporters. The inevitable result was a confused mandate that has made the work of the Endowment and the policies of its four chairmen the focus of congressional and public criticism. One group of critics has found NEH too elitist -- awarding too many grants to scholars at a few major universities. Others have regarded it as too populist -- expending too much on organizations that have little to do with the humanities. Still others regard its programs as simply a waste of the taxpayers' money. Excellence and Equity explores the continuing political controversy surrounding NEH and its chairmen and assesses in detail its impact on the humanities in four major program areas: research, teaching, preservation, and public programs. The book concludes with recommendations for restructuring the Endowment, for revising its review procedures, and for improving the process by which its chairman is selected. Only through such changes, Miller argues, can we hope to foster humanistic scholarship in the coming decades.

This book reveals the sources of the disquiet prevailing among educators over the apparent failure of the public school system to develop moral responsibility in America's youth. The doctrine of separation of church and state has made sectarian religious training illegal in public schools, and Tunis Romein shows that the task of providing moral guidance, suddenly thrust upon educators, has disclosed their deep schisms in educational philosophy -- basic contradictions which have split American education from top to bottom. Romein explains the basic conflicts in education by examining three educational philosophies -- progressivism, educational reconstructionism, and classical humanism -- and comparing all of them with the traditional Christian view. He holds that all educational philosophies, whether secular or not, are based on faith, and that all can be tested with regard to their beliefs about the nature of man and about the kind of moral responsibility education should develop in man. With sincerity and frankness, Romein analyzes the moral and intellectual poverty of much of the thinking dominant in education today, and he shows the necessity as well as the difficulty of making faith in God once more the underlying influence in American education.

The tangled relationship of power and higher education is a fascinating one. Where power centers arise on campus, they influence and are influenced by sources of power outside. Students, faculty and administration compete for authority within the academic community; citizens whose education has placed them in a position to obtain social, political, and economic power outside the university walls frequently use it in a way that deeply affects the direction and nature of academic development. This collection of thought-provoking essays is dedicated to Professor Louis Smith, who has long been a student of higher education in this country and abroad. Considering matters as varied as the place of the department head in the academic hierarchy and the image of political leadership promulgated by the academic world, distinguished scholars present here a rich harvest of insights on a significant topic.

In their concern with the perennial controversy between the two great areas in which men seek knowledge, three eminent literary scholars and a distinguished journalist in these essays address themselves to the question, "Do the humanities provide a form of understanding of reality that the sciences do not?" Monroe C. Beardsley maintains that the humanities considered as contributors to knowledge must deal with the same subject matter as the sciences, but literature and the arts can enlarge our powers of understanding human nature, although not in the way the sciences do (under empirically or logically verifiable laws). Northrop Frye, while acknowledging the difference in methodology and mental attitude, asserts that the humanities, on the other hand, express man's concern for this world most clearly in the myths by which man realizes his involvement in mankind and his responsibility for his own destiny. Frank Kermode argues that to follow the ways of sciences in searching out repetitions such as make myths is to lose sight of the unique, particular, and concrete expressions which underlie personal participation and sharpen the sensibilities. And this experience, he maintains, is the peculiar contribution of the humanities. In the final essay, Barry Bingham, editor and publisher of the Louisville Courier-Joumal, calls for a vigorous cultivation of the liberal arts in American life.

In these four notable essays based on Centennial lectures, four eminent scholars analyze the tensions affecting university education today and the forces which will shape the American university of the future. Kenneth D. Benne, director of the Human Relations Center of Boston University, describes the fragmentation which has come to characterize the university in 1965 in three divergent philosophies of university education and calls for the universities to undertake a radical change of their social organization. For, he says, only by restoring the community of learning can the universities exercise their proper leadership in resolving the conflicts and tensions of modern society. The place of the university as a clearing house of ideas and as the training center for new professions and services is set forth by Sir Charles Morris, vice chancellor of the University of Leeds, and by Henry Steele Commager, professor of American Studies at Amherst College. Finally, Gunnar Myrdal of the Institute of International Economic Studies in the University of Stockholm, looking at the probable social and economic trends of the future, sees the expansion of professional, practical, and research training, but warns that the social and moral implications of knowledge cannot be ignored, especially in view of the increasing demands of the developing countries upon the affluent nations.