A long-time writing program administrator and well-respected iconoclast, Irvin Peckham is strongly identified with progressive ideologies in education. However, inGoing North Thinking West, Peckham ...mounts a serious critique of what is called critical pedagogy-primarily a project of the academic left-in spite of his own sympathies there.
College composition is fundamentally a middle-class enterprise, and is conducted by middle-class professionals, while student demographics show increasing presence of the working class. In spite of best intentions to ameliorate inequitable social class relationships, says Peckham, critical pedagogies can actually contribute to reproducing those relationships in traditional forms-not only perpetuating social inequities, but pushing working class students toward self-alienation, as well.
Peckham argues for more clarity on the history of critical thinking, social class structures and teacher identity (especially as these are theorized by Pierre Bourdieu), while he undertakes a critical inquiry of the teaching practices with which even he identifies.
Going North Thinking Westfocuses especially on writing teachers who claim a necessary linkage between critical thinking and writing skills; these would include both teachers who promote the fairly a-political position that argumentation is the obvious and necessary form of academic discourse, and more controversial teachers who advocate turning a classroom into a productive site of social transformation.
Ultimately, Peckham argues for a rereading of Freire (an icon of transformational pedagogy), and for a collaborative investigation of students' worlds as the first step in a successful writing pedagogy. It is an argument for a pedagogy based on service to students rather than on transforming them.
The Coming Generational Storm Burns, Scott; Kotlikoff, Laurence J
2004, 2005, 2005-01-18, 20040101, Letnik:
1
eBook, Book
How to avoid a fiscal crisis in the next generation-- and how to protect yourself if the government acts too late: policy recommendations and individual strategies to protect against skyrocketing tax ...rates, drastically reduced health and retirement benefits, high inflation, and a ruined currency.
The major lesson from the 1990s is that relatively superficial changes in the character of urban life can be associated with up to 75% drops in the crime rate. Crime can drop even if there is no ...major change in the population, the economy or the schools. Offering the most reliable data available, this book documents the decline in the 1990s in American crime as the longest and largest since World War II. It ranges across both violent and non-violent offenses, all regions, and every demographic. All Americans, whether they live in cities or suburbs, whether rich or poor, are safer today. Casting a critical and unerring eye on current explanations, the book demonstrates that both long-standing theories of crime prevention and recently generated theories fall far short of explaining the drop in the 1990s. A careful study of Canadian crime trends reveals that imprisonment and economic factors may not have played the role in the U.S. crime drop that many have suggested. A combination of factors rather than a single cause produced the decline. It is clear that declines in the crime rate do not require fundamental social or structural change, but that smaller shifts in policy can make large differences. The significant reductions in crime rates, especially in New York, where crime dropped twice the national average, suggests that there is room for other cities to repeat this astounding success.
In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from ...Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities—in particular oil—that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II. Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.
Raghuram Rajan was one of the few economists who warned of the global financial crisis before it hit. Now, as the world struggles to recover, it's tempting to blame what happened on just a few greedy ...bankers who took irrational risks and left the rest of us to foot the bill. InFault Lines, Rajan argues that serious flaws in the economy are also to blame, and warns that a potentially more devastating crisis awaits us if they aren't fixed.
Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown--made by bankers, government officials, and ordinary homeowners--were rational responses to a flawed global financial order in which the incentives to take on risk are incredibly out of step with the dangers those risks pose. He traces the deepening fault lines in a world overly dependent on the indebted American consumer to power global economic growth and stave off global downturns. He exposes a system where America's growing inequality and thin social safety net create tremendous political pressure to encourage easy credit and keep job creation robust, no matter what the consequences to the economy's long-term health; and where the U.S. financial sector, with its skewed incentives, is the critical but unstable link between an overstimulated America and an underconsuming world.
InFault Lines, Rajan demonstrates how unequal access to education and health care in the United States puts us all in deeper financial peril, even as the economic choices of countries like Germany, Japan, and China place an undue burden on America to get its policies right. He outlines the hard choices we need to make to ensure a more stable world economy and restore lasting prosperity.
In the wake of the New Deal, U.S. politics has been popularly imagined as an ongoing conflict between small-government conservatives and big-government liberals. In practice, narratives of left ...versus right or government versus the people do not begin to capture the dynamic ways Americans pursue civic goals while protecting individual freedoms. Brian Balogh proposes a new view of U.S. politics that illuminates how public and private actors collaborate to achieve collective goals. This "associational synthesis" treats the relationship between state and civil society as fluid and challenges interpretations that map the trajectory of American politics solely along ideological lines. Rather, both liberals and conservatives have extended the authority of the state but have done so most successfully when state action is mediated through nongovernmental institutions, such as universities, corporations, interest groups, and other voluntary organizations.
The Associational Stateprovides a fresh perspective on the crucial role that the private sector, trade associations, and professional organizations have played in implementing public policies from the late nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Balogh examines key historical periods through the lens of political development, paying particular attention to the ways government, social movements, and intermediary institutions have organized support and resources to achieve public ends. Exposing the gap between the ideological rhetoric that both parties deploy today and their far less ideologically driven behavior over the past century and a half,The Associational Stateoffers one solution to the partisan gridlock that currently grips the nation.
We all know that Google stores huge amounts of information about everyone who uses its search tools, that Amazon can recommend new books to us based on our past purchases, and that the U.S. ...government engaged in many data-mining activities during the Bush administration to acquire information about us, including involving telecommunications companies in monitoring our phone calls (currently the subject of a bill in Congress). Control over access to our bodies and to special places, like our homes, has traditionally been the focus of concerns about privacy, but access to information about us is raising new challenges for those anxious to protect our privacy. In Privacy Rights, Adam Moore adds informational privacy to physical and spatial privacy as fundamental to developing a general theory of privacy that is well grounded morally and legally.
Money in the House Currinder, Marian
c2009., 2009, 20180504, 2008, 2018-05-04, 20090101
eBook
"This book provides a compelling look at how the drive to raise campaign money has come to dominate congressional party politics. Author Marian Currinder examines the rise of member-to-member and ...member-to-party giving as part of a broader process that encourages ambitious House members to compete for power by raising money for the party and its candidates. In order to give for the good of the whole, lawmakers must devote ever increasing amounts of time to fundraising. The fundraising expectations for members who wish to advance in the chamber are even higher. Currinder argues that the new "rule of money" is fundamentally altering the way House members pursue power and the way congressional parties define and reward loyalty."--BOOK JACKET.
