Let’s build a foster care system that nurtures each child’s creativity, capacity for joy, and emotional wellness. Here’s how.
Articles
Overcoming the Sexual and Religious Legacies of Slavery
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Because of the U.S. history of slavery, assumptions about the sexuality of African American women in the United States differ from those made about European American women. The sexual stereotype of enslaved women as licentious extends far back into history; modern racism extended it to all Black women and also used the myth of Black hypersexuality as a reason to enslave Black people.
Articles
How the Online Revolution in Higher Education Will Eliminate Faculty Jobs
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The world of higher education seems poised to enter a period of stark change: the onset of mass online education. Awash with excitement over this development, too many pundits are failing to discuss the cultural and ecological problems that the Internet revolution exacerbates.
Activism
Called to Montgomery
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What would it take to recruit students for a movement to build community, as Martin Luther King dreamed? A Christian minister reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and how we might move from disengagement to social action.
2012
Educators and Academics: Educate Yourselves as Americans Turn to the Right
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Few of us have any ability to offset the massive indoctrination toward materialism and selfishness offered by the mass media. There’s only one group in society that has similar access and ability to shape the worldviews and belief structures of most Americans: teachers and academics.
2012
Educating for Wisdom
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What Wilhelm and Novak have to say represents a light in dark times. They have written a book that is at once a sophisticated philosophical treatise on education and a radical guide for those who teach kids in the classroom.
2012
Shifting School Culture
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During the fall of 2005, I (Rita) was employed by the Oakland Unified School District as a case manager working with students and their families who were referred for expulsion. My job was to create a paradigm shift within the school context by introducing restorative justice as an alternative to the traditional discipline system. Together, we began the restorative justice journey at Cole.
Activism
Early Days of the New Student Revolt
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Springtime is a very good and very timely volume, even if so much has changed since last fall, when the final pieces were completed, that things look rather different. The outcomes remain in doubt, of course. The crises in education, mirroring the crises in society at large, make Education Under Fire (soon to be an MR Press book) useful in a complementary fashion, setting the structure and some of the backstory in place.
Articles
Educating for Peace
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Overcoming violence is one of the great intellectual, moral, and spiritual challenges we face as a human community — yet U.S. schools rarely see peace-building as their goal. It’s time for us to rethink our understanding of the purpose of education.
2011
The Real Education Reformers: Why Chicago Mothers and Teachers Are Doing More than “Waiting for Superman”
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Don’t race to the top, look to the grassroots for the future health of our schools.
2011
Formative Culture in the Age of Imposed Forgetting
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The cultural politics of casino capitalism has numbed our sense of social and moral responsibility. Against this moral coma, with its theater of cruelty and legalized irresponsibility, we need to recast the language of politics.
2011
Tikkun Olam and the Work of Education
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For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
2011
“Mending Wall”: The Case for the Humanities Classroom
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Tenured humanists are an endangered species, possibly the last of a dying breed. Even now, adjunct instructors and graduate assistants teach most of the courses. Further, the ubiquitous presence of for-profit and online universities has increased pressure on brick-and-mortar universities to offer students more options for taking courses via the computer screen.
2010
Coercive Environments
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Education. Consumerism. Incarceration. Henry Giroux’s new book identifies these as three key forces in binding contemporary youth to the social structures of neoliberalism.
2010
How Closed are “Closed Minds”?
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When I moved to the University of Missouri after having worked in Boston, I found that approaches to racial and gender equality that worked in New England were counterproductive in our work in the lower Midwest. We asked students to share what they valued in their culture, what nurtured and sustained them. We experienced the joy of expanding circles of deliberation and engagement with those we had formerly seen as prejudiced, closed-minded, and uninterested in learning