Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.

Despite being immensely popular--and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity—in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As and casually forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for the average worker but instead in runaway credential inflation, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely if ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Caplan draws on the latest social science to show how the labor market values grades over knowledge, and why the more education your rivals have, the more you need to impress employers. He explains why graduation is our society's top conformity signal, and why even the most useless degrees can certify employability. He advocates two major policy responses. The first is educational austerity. Government needs to sharply cut education funding to curb this wasteful rat race. The second is more vocational education, because practical skills are more socially valuable than teaching students how to outshine their peers. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense — The Case against Education points the way. (less)

This is the long-awaited second volume of Pascarella and Terenzini's 1991 award-winning review of the research on the impacts of college on students. The authors review their earlier findings and then synthesize what has been learned since 1990 about college's influences on students’ learning. The book also discusses the implications of the findings for research, practice, and public policy. This authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the literature on college-impact is required reading for anyone interested in higher education practice, policy, and promise¾faculty, administrators, researchers, policy analysts, and decision-makers at every level.

A number of years ago, Douglas Harper moved to northern New York to teach in a small college. Upon his arrival there his department chairman noted his eight-year-old Saab and said, "You'll be meeting Willie." Haper spent the next years establishing not only a working relationship but a friendship with Willie. In "Working Knowledge," he introduces us to Willie, a mechanic and jack-of-all-trades. With this engaging and insightful profile--part biography, part ethnography, and part photo essay--Harper documents what Willie does and how he does it. Harper's dignified portrait captures a disappearing feature of modern life--the essential human factor in the world of work.

This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements. Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different constituencies - inner-city African American cultural essentialists and predominately white suburban Christian conservatives - Afrocentrists and creationists had much in common. Both made similar arguments about oppression and their children's well-being, both faced skepticism from educators about their factual claims, and both mounted their challenges through bureaucratic channels. In each case, challenged school systems were ultimately able to minimize or reject challengers' demands, but the process varied by case and type of challenge. Binder finds that Afrocentrists were more successful in advancing their cause than were creationists because they appeared to offer a solution to the real problem of urban school failure, met with more administrative sympathy toward their complaints of historic exclusion, sought to alter lower-prestige curricula (history, not science), and faced opponents who lacked a legal remedy comparable to the rule of church-state separation invoked by creationism's opponents. Binder's analysis yields several lessons for social movements research, suggesting that researchers need to pay greater attention to how movements seek to influence bureaucratic decision making, often from within. It also demonstrates the benefits of examining discursive, structural, and institutional factors in concert.

SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can't tell a college everything that's important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In "College Admissions for the 21st Century", a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing. Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow's leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom. How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is 'Kaleidoscope', a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests. Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class' average SATs and high school GPAs went up too. What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.

More than one million American children are schooled by their parents. As their ranks grow, home schoolers are making headlines by winning national spelling bees and excelling at elite universities. The few studies conducted suggest that homeschooled children are academically successful and remarkably well socialized. Yet we still know little about this alternative to one of society’s most fundamental institutions. Beyond a vague notion of children reading around the kitchen table, we don’t know what home schooling looks like from the inside. Sociologist Mitchell Stevens goes behind the scenes of the homeschool movement and into the homes and meetings of home schoolers. What he finds are two very different kinds of home education—one rooted in the liberal alternative school movement of the 1960s and 1970s and one stemming from the Christian day school movement of the same era. Stevens explains how this dual history shapes the meaning and practice of home schooling today. In the process, he introduces us to an unlikely mix of parents (including fundamentalist Protestants, pagans, naturalists, and educational radicals) and notes the core values on which they agree: the sanctity of childhood and the primacy of family in the face of a highly competitive, bureaucratized society. Kingdom of Children aptly places home schoolers within longer traditions of American social activism. It reveals that home schooling is not a random collection of individuals but an elaborate social movement with its own celebrities, networks, and characteristic lifeways. Stevens shows how home schoolers have built their philosophical and religious convictions into the practical structure of the cause, and documents the political consequences of their success at doing so. Ultimately, the history of home schooling serves as a parable about the organizational strategies of the progressive left and the religious right since the 1960s.Kingdom of Children shows what happens when progressive ideals meet conventional politics, demonstrates the extraordinary political capacity of conservative Protestantism, and explains the subtle ways in which cultural sensibility shapes social movement outcomes more generally.

书的主题是智力教育。我从多个角度阐述了贯穿各章的一个核心观念，这个观念可以简要地表述为：学生是充满活力的，教育的目的在于促进和引导学生的自我发展。而这必然意味着，教师们也应该永葆活跃的思维。由此，全书对死板的知识或者说僵化的思想进行了抨击。除第9章之外，其余各章都是怀特海在各种教育机构和科学团体的会议上做过的演讲。它们来源于实践经验，反思了教育现状，并对所涉及的那些话题的意义提出了一些批判性的见解。

How could educated professionals have supported the Nazi movement and collaborated with Hitler's inhuman policies? Jarausch examines this fascinating and largely unexplored subject, tracing the social, ideological, and political development of three representative German professions--law, teaching, and engineering--from the late Empire to the early Federal Republic. Based on a reformulated professionalization theory and on authoritative statistics, he describes professional prosperity and prestige in the Second Reich and analyzes the social crisis brought on by hyperinflation, stabilization, and Depression during the chaotic Weimar years. Threatened with the loss of livelihood and frightened by cultural disorientation, many experts embraced neo-conservative ideas and cooperated in Hitler's seizure of power. Welcoming the apparent restoration of their authority in the early Third Reich, professionals collaborated in the racial purges and warping of ethics, practices, and organizations under Nazi rule. During the Second World War, the radicalization of SS terror threatened the very survival of the professions so that most practitioners were only too happy to be rescued by Allied victory. Exploring the reluctant democratization of the post-war professions, Jarausch concludes with a reflection on the lessons of the German experience for the relationship between professionalism and liberty.

Learning to argue and persuade in a highly competitive environment is only one aspect of life on a high-school debate team. Teenage debaters also participate in a distinct cultural world--complete with its own jargon and status system--in which they must negotiate complicated relationships with teammates, competitors, coaches, and parents as well as classmates outside the debating circuit. In Gifted Tongues, Gary Alan Fine offers a rich description of this world as a testing ground for both intellectual and emotional development, while seeking to understand adolescents as social actors. Considering the benefits and drawbacks of the debating experience, he also recommends ways of reshaping programs so that more high schools can use them to boost academic performance and foster specific skills in citizenship. Fine analyzes the training of debaters in rapid-fire speech, rules of logical argumentation, and the strategic use of evidence, and how this training instills the core values of such American institutions as law and politics. Debates, however, sometimes veer quickly from fine displays of logic to acts of immaturity--a reflection of the tensions experienced by young people learning to think as adults. Fine contributes to our understanding of teenage years by encouraging us not to view them as a distinct stage of development but rather a time in which young people draw from a toolkit of both childlike and adult behaviors. A well-designed debate program, he concludes, nurtures the intellect while providing a setting in which teens learn to make better behavioral choices, ones that will shape relationships in their personal, professional, and civic lives.

In this important theoretical treatist, Jean Lave, anthropologist, and Etienne Wenger, computer scientist, push forward the notion of situated learning - that learning is fundamentally a social process. The authors maintain that learning viewed as situated activity has as its central defining characteristic a process they call legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). Learners participate in communities of practitioners, moving toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community. LPP provides a way to speak about crucial relations between newcomers and old-timers and about their activities, identities, artefacts, knowledge and practice. The communities discussed in the book are midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, and recovering alcoholics, however, the process by which participants in those communities learn can be generalised to other social groups.

科举制度的实施场所——“贡院”，何以在考官与举子的笔下成为“棘闱”？ 考官与举子，在这个在他们笔下称为“棘闱”的空间里，经历了哪些心理变化，产生了怎样的互动？ 由此，表征着“礼乐”“求贤”的科举考试，实质上又是一种怎样的行动？ ----------------- 本书借助空间社会学、心态史学等理论，在研读相关史料的基础上，结合这个空间的建筑学原理，指出这是一个具有双重意义的制度化空间，一方面表征着“礼乐”“求贤”，而实质上则是利用建筑学的物理功能而进行监督、隔离的规训空间。 同时，空间也是社会实践本身，它以隐性的方式参与着发生在这个空间之内的种种活动；这个空间附丽于科举制度，既伴随着科举制度的发展而逐渐建构起来，更由于作为社会活动主体的人在其中的种种活动而彰显意义。 因此，本书将笔触延伸至这个空间之中的形形色色的活动，描述支持着这些活动背后的种种心态，从而使得这个空间的实质，以及主导着建构这个空间的某些“精神”层面的东西得以澄明。

本书通过追溯19世纪下半叶到20世纪70年代晚期一百多年来的美国教育发展历史，主要以医学、法律和工程学教育为例，剖析了文凭社会是如何形成的、对社会产生的正面和负面影响，展现了文凭异化的过程，解释了学校教育与社会分层的内在关系，进而完成了对当代资本主义教育制度的反思和批判，最后则提出了化解文凭主义弊端的办法，预测了文凭主义在未来社会中的处境。 作者针砭时弊，揭穿了关于教育的诸多神话，认为建立在教育基础之上的文凭社会是一种不合理的分层机制，建议废除文凭。在当下这个文凭社会的势力越来越强的时代，书中内容有助于我们更好地理解当前面临的诸多教育问题，积极思谋应对之策。

When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority - for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal's office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell's Room 101. But with "School Principal", Dan C. Lortie aims to change that. Much as he did for teachers with his groundbreaking book "Schoolteacher", Lortie offers here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why. Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal's job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects' professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, "School Principal" offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government. Lortie's scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, "School Principal" is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.

A revolutionary new argument from eminent Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits attacking the false promise of meritocracy It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has become exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy's successes. This is the radical argument that Daniel Markovits prosecutes with rare force. Markovits is well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within. Markovits also knows that, if we understand that meritocratic inequality produces near-universal harm, we can cure it. When The Meritocracy Trap reveals the inner workings of the meritocratic machine, it also illuminates the first steps outward, towards a new world that might once again afford dignity and prosperity to the American people.

In the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly looked to the schools--and, in particular, to the nation's colleges and universities--as guardians of the cherished national ideal of equality of opportunity. With the best jobs increasingly monopolized by those with higher education, the opportunity to attend college has become an integral part of the American dream of upward mobility. The two-year college--which now enrolls more than four million students in over 900 institutions--is a central expression of this dream, and its invention at the turn of the century constituted one of the great innovations in the history of American education. By offering students of limited means the opportunity to start higher education at home and to later transfer to a four-year institution, the two-year school provided a major new pathway to a college diploma--and to the nation's growing professional and managerial classes. But in the past two decades, the community college has undergone a profound change, shifting its emphasis from liberal-arts transfer courses to terminal vocational programs. Drawing on developments nationwide as well as in the specific case of Massachusetts, Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel offer a history of community colleges in America, explaining why this shift has occurred after years of student resistance and examining its implications for upward mobility. As the authors argue in this exhaustively researched and pioneering study, the junior college has always faced the contradictory task of extending a college education to the hitherto excluded, while diverting the majority of them from the nation's four-year colleges and universities. Very early on, two-year college administrators perceived vocational training for "semi-professional" work as their and their students' most secure long-term niche in the educational hierarchy. With two thirds of all community college students enrolled in vocational programs, the authors contend that the dream of education as a route to upward mobility, as well as the ideal of equal educational opportunity for all, are seriously threatened. With the growing public debate about the state of American higher education and with more than half of all first-time degree-credit students now enrolled in community colleges, a full-scale, historically grounded examination of their place in American life is long overdue. This landmark study provides such an examination, and in so doing, casts critical light on what is distinctive not only about American education, but American society itself.

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but, as "Producing Success" makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. "Producing Success" reveals the many ways the community's ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethic and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and, administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students 'valedictorians'. Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, "Producing Success" is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

Written by a recipient of a MacArthur award, gained for her pioneering work on the storytelling technique and its use in the classroom, this book focuses on the challenge posed by the isolated child to teachers and classmates alike in the community of the classroom. It is the story of Jason - the loner and outsider - and his ultimate triumph and homecoming into the society of his classmates. As the reader follows Jason's struggle, it can be seen how the classroom is a crucible within which the young discover themselves and learn to confront new problems in their daily experience. The book is an essay on the practice of teaching young children and the author uses children's stories as a vehicle of instruction.