This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better? Do business management theories and practices make organizations more effective? What if the most widely used management theories and assessment tools don't work? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless? What if administrators don't know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can't measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. How is a business-model of economic efficiency supposed to increase the competing, and perhaps mutually exclusive, ends of schooling, such as human development, student learning, personal satisfaction, social mobility, and economic growth? What if students don't learn much in schools? What if schools were never designed to produce student learning? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.

This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better? Do business management theories and practices make organizations more effective? What if the most widely used management theories and assessment tools don't work? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless? What if administrators don't know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can't measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. How is a business-model of economic efficiency supposed to increase the competing, and perhaps mutually exclusive, ends of schooling, such as human development, student learning, personal satisfaction, social mobility, and economic growth? What if students don't learn much in schools? What if schools were never designed to produce student learning? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.

This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don't actually measure what they're supposed to? What if accountability data isn't valid, or worse, what if it's meaningless? What if administrators don't know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can't measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. What if students don't learn much in college? What if higher education was never designed to produce student learning? What if college doesn't help most students, either personally or economically? What if higher education isn't meritocratic, actually exacerbates inequality, and makes the lives of disadvantaged students even worse? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.

This book defines the concept and practices of literacy through a discussion of knowledge, information media, culture, subjectivity, science, communication, and politics. Examining the ways in which the spread of literacy and education have caused culture wars in pluralist societies since the 16th century, the author reviews an interdisciplinary array of scholarly literature to contend that science, and more broadly evidence-based inductive arguments, offer the only reliable source information, and the only peaceful solution to cultural conflict in the 21st century. With a focus on the multifaceted practice of literacy-as-communication as embedded within larger social and political processes, this book offers a comprehensive study of literacy through five core topics: knowledge, psychology, culture, science, and arguing over truth in pluralist democracies. The central thesis of the book argues that we require a new literacy that incorporates reading and writing with advanced cognitive and epistemological skills. Today's citizens need to be able to understand the basic cognitive and cultural processes through which knowledge is created, and they need to know how to evaluate knowledge, peacefully debate knowledge, and productively use knowledge, for both personal decisions and public policy. How Do You Know? The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across the sciences and humanities, especially those concerned with pedagogy and the science of learning.

This book defines the concept and practices of literacy through a discussion of knowledge, information media, culture, subjectivity, science, communication, and politics. Examining the ways in which the spread of literacy and education have caused culture wars in pluralist societies since the 16th century, the author reviews an interdisciplinary array of scholarly literature to contend that science, and more broadly evidence-based inductive arguments, offer the only reliable source information, and the only peaceful solution to cultural conflict in the 21st century. With a focus on the multifaceted practice of literacy-as-communication as embedded within larger social and political processes, this book offers a comprehensive study of literacy through five core topics: knowledge, psychology, culture, science, and arguing over truth in pluralist democracies. The central thesis of the book argues that we require a new literacy that incorporates reading and writing with advanced cognitive and epistemological skills. Today's citizens need to be able to understand the basic cognitive and cultural processes through which knowledge is created, and they need to know how to evaluate knowledge, peacefully debate knowledge, and productively use knowledge, for both personal decisions and public policy. How Do You Know? The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across the sciences and humanities, especially those concerned with pedagogy and the science of learning.

In Studies in Ideology, poet and theorist J.M. Beach delivers a comprehensive analysis of the history and theory of "ideology." The narrow concept of ideology has traditionally been lodged in the domain of Marxist political theory, but Beach reaches past Marxism to focus on the "wide" definition of ideology, which can be basically summarized as "all theory is ideological." Beach strays from the Marxist totalizing and determinist narratives to deliver a discussion of ideology as "process," which takes its lead from Gramsci and analyzes the intricate and complicated mechanisms of individual subject formation in relation to dominant/dominating social modes of meaning productions. Beach offers his theory of ideology in conjunction with an extensive reading of history and contemporary affairs and ends the book with a brief biographical sketch of his own intellectual maturation, which is imbedded within a daring and timely critique of Christianity.

In Studies in Poetry, J.M. Beach traces the history of poetry and poetic philosophy in the West. Beach provides a comprehensive, yet selective look into the more "radical" figures of English and American literature, and a topical exploration of Western Poetic Theory, centered on a humanistic mysticism-specifically on romantic theories of the mind and subjectivity. This book will give students a generalized, yet relevantly contemporary definition of "poetry," through an in-depth exploration of several poet's major works and themes.

In Studies in Poetry, J.M. Beach traces the history of poetry and poetic philosophy in the West. Beach provides a comprehensive, yet selective look into the more 'radical' figures of English and American literature, and a topical exploration of Western Poetic Theory, centered on a humanistic mysticism specifically on romantic theories of the mind and subjectivity. This book will give students a generalized, yet relevantly contemporary definition of 'poetry, ' through an in-depth exploration of several poet's major works and themes."

Can the U.S. keep its dominant economic position in the world economy with only 30% of its population holding bachelor's degrees? If the majority of U.S. citizens lack a higher education, can the U.S. live up to its democratic principles and preserve its political institutions? These questions raise the critical issue of access to higher education, central to which are America's open-access, low-cost community colleges that enroll around half of all first-time freshmen in the U.S. Can these institutions bridge the gap, and how might they do so? The answer is complicated by multiple missions--gateways to 4-year colleges, providers of occupational education, community services, and workforce development, as well as of basic skills instruction and remediation. To enable today's administrators and policy makers to understand and contextualize the complexity of the present, this history describes and analyzes the ideological, social, and political motives that led to the creation of community colleges, and that have shaped their subsequent development. In doing so, it fills a large void in our knowledge of these institutions. The ""junior college,"" later renamed the ""community college"" in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally designed to limit access to higher education in the name of social efficiency. Subsequently leaders and communities tried to refashion this institution into a tool for increased social mobility, community organization, and regional economic development. Thus, community colleges were born of contradictions, and continue to be an enigma. This history examines the institutionalization process of the community college in the United States, casting light on how this educational institution was formed, for what purposes, and how has it evolved. It uncovers the historically conditioned rules, procedures, rituals, and ideas that ordered and defined the particular educational structure of these colleges; and focuses on the individuals, organizations, ideas, and the larger political economy that contributed to defining the community college's educational missions, and have enabled or constrained this institution from enacting those missions. He also sets the history in the context of the contemporary debates about access and effectiveness, and traces how these colleges have responded to calls for accountability from the 1970s to the present. Community colleges hold immense promise if they can overcome their historical legacy and be re-institutionalized with unified missions, clear goals of educational success, and adequate financial resources. This book presents the history in all its complexity so that policy makers and practitioners might better understand the constraints of the past in an effort to realize the possibilities of the future.

Can the U.S. keep its dominant economic position in the world economy with only 30% of its population holding bachelor's degrees? If the majority of U.S. citizens lack a higher education, can the U.S. live up to its democratic principles and preserve its political institutions? These questions raise the critical issue of access to higher education, central to which are America's open-access, low-cost community colleges that enroll around half of all first-time freshmen in the U.S. Can these institutions bridge the gap, and how might they do so? The answer is complicated by multiple missions--gateways to 4-year colleges, providers of occupational education, community services, and workforce development, as well as of basic skills instruction and remediation. To enable today's administrators and policy makers to understand and contextualize the complexity of the present, this history describes and analyzes the ideological, social, and political motives that led to the creation of community colleges, and that have shaped their subsequent development. In doing so, it fills a large void in our knowledge of these institutions. The ""junior college,"" later renamed the ""community college"" in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally designed to limit access to higher education in the name of social efficiency. Subsequently leaders and communities tried to refashion this institution into a tool for increased social mobility, community organization, and regional economic development. Thus, community colleges were born of contradictions, and continue to be an enigma. This history examines the institutionalization process of the community college in the United States, casting light on how this educational institution was formed, for what purposes, and how has it evolved. It uncovers the historically conditioned rules, procedures, rituals, and ideas that ordered and defined the particular educational structure of these colleges; and focuses on the individuals, organizations, ideas, and the larger political economy that contributed to defining the community college's educational missions, and have enabled or constrained this institution from enacting those missions. He also sets the history in the context of the contemporary debates about access and effectiveness, and traces how these colleges have responded to calls for accountability from the 1970s to the present. Community colleges hold immense promise if they can overcome their historical legacy and be re-institutionalized with unified missions, clear goals of educational success, and adequate financial resources. This book presents the history in all its complexity so that policy makers and practitioners might better understand the constraints of the past in an effort to realize the possibilities of the future.

William Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, wanted to believe that Blake was a "new kind of man; and hence his was a new kind of art, and a new kind of poetry." However, what sets William Blake apart as a great poet and artist was not that he was so "new," but that he was so "old." He was a part of a mytho-poetic and Vatic tradition as old as poetry itself. Blake was heir to a mytho-poetic tradition that can be traced back to the very foundations of human thought and speech. The extraordinary in William Blake was not the "man," but his Vision and how he expressed it. But most (if not all) of Blake's contemporaries, and a great many since, wrote Blake's genius off as madness. Gilchrist explained, "it is only within that last century and a half that] the faculty of seeing visions could have been one to bring a man's sanity into question." But divine inspiration has always been the hallmark of mythological poetry and religious prophetic utterance, and Daemonic inspiration was even the source of Socrates' rationalism. It is realizing and perfecting the "visionary" component of the human mind, which is the central focus of most Visionary's work - sometimes to the point of alienating those do not share in the Visionary understanding. But Blake "claimed the possession of some powers only in a greater degree that all men possessed and which they undervalued in themselves & lost through love of sordid pursuits." The Visionary, while seen as extraordinary and a genius, is only a glimpse of what all human beings can experience for themselves. Blake's poetry needs to be read as the expression of a visionary genius who saw what others could not see. He is an enduring testament to the creative powers of the human mind. The book includes: Selected Poetry of William Blake Songs of Innocence Songs of Experience The Book of Thel The Marriage of Heaven and Hell All Religions are One There is NO Natural Religion The Book of Urizen Jerusalem Selected Letters of William Blake

This volume collects the best of J. M. Beach's poetry and essays on the theory and practice of poetry.

Shelley took his place within the vatic history of mythopoetic bards and bore the Visionary legacy. He offered a simple "spark" of poetry to his audience while promising a raging fire would burn if the poetry was nurtured correctly. However, Shelley realized that most people cannot accept the poet's offering (for various reasons; ignoring, rejecting or misunderstanding) and they let that spark smolder into nothing. Shelley shouts into his written words, leaving his hard-earned knowledge of the human condition and his visionary plight for willing human ears. Shelley paints himself as the Visionary, sound and steady within a wisdom that understands the suffering beauty of the human condition, who sits as a "tranquil star" to burn as heavenly light. Shelley's hope is to guide humanity through the dark night of doubt and fear towards the possibility laying dormant within being human. This volume contains the following essays: A Defence of Poetry On Love On Life On A Future State On the Punishment of Death, A Fragment Speculations on Metaphysics Speculations on Morals Essay on the Literature, The Arts, and the Manners of the Athenians, A Fragment On the Symposium, Or Preface to the Banquet of Plato, A Fragment Even Love is Sold, An Essay on Prostitution The Necessity of Atheism, A Note on Queen Mab

This book investigates the historiography on the concept of progressivism and the progressive movement in United States History, including both progressive political movements and progressive educational movements. It also investigates the concept and historiography of Americanism and the Americanization movement, as well as contemporary debates over American nationalism and the culture wars.

Shelley took his place within the vatic history of mythopoetic bards and bore the Visionary legacy. He offered a simple "spark" of poetry to his audience while promising a raging fire would burn if the poetry was nurtured correctly. However, Shelley realized that most people cannot accept the poet's offering (for various reasons; ignoring, rejecting or misunderstanding) and they let that spark smolder into nothing. Shelley shouts into his written words, leaving his hard-earned knowledge of the human condition and his visionary plight for willing human ears. Shelley paints himself as the Visionary, sound and steady within a wisdom that understands the suffering beauty of the human condition, who sits as a "tranquil star" to burn as heavenly light. Shelley's hope is to guide humanity through the dark night of doubt and fear towards the possibility laying dormant within being human. This volume contains the first three volumes of Shelley's complete works of both poetry and prose, with an introduction by J. M. Beach. Volume I: Early Poems Volume II: Later Poems & Plays Volume III: Essays You can find Shelley's collected translations in Volume IV, published separately.

Henry David Thoreau remains an enduring figure, not only in the field of American literature, but also as a man who lived his life deliberately and out-loud, so others could by his measure find what it means to be a human being - what it means to be alive. As a writer he put pen to paper to find what it meant to live, and thereby, to communicate his meaning and his life. Thoreau is best remembered in terms of his conviction -- his unwavering faith that he could understand the mystery and translate the essence of Life. Through a study of Thoreau's trail of meaningful words, one embarks on a path to trace the rare example of a true man of letters who wrote not to display his wit or talent or mastery of language, but who wrote to convey his conviction -- his very raison d'etre -- so that others could find a meaning and a fulfillment that comes only after a passionate and thorough search. Thoreau was a spiritual trailblazer, an enlightened one, a Visionary. Generations will continue to follow his lead. This book contains Thoreau's two most famous essays: Civil Disobedience and Walden. It also contains an introductory essay by J. M. Beach, which investigates Thoreau's legacy in American literature.

In 16th century Europe, poetry had lost much of its cultural value. It became known as a narrow and frivolous activity, much like it is now, and it was under attack by religious authorities because it was seen as licentious or subversive. So Sidney prepared "a legal defense" of poetry, trying to restore this sacred practice to its former glory. Sidney tried to argue that poetry was not the frivolous activity that many contemporary poets were practicing. Instead, he argued that it was an ancient epistemological tradition. He tried to prove that it was a serious intellectual endeavor that embodied the Renaissance principle of "reason," every bit as important as history or philosophy. He further argued that poetry was not subversive. It supported traditional didactic, moral, and religious purposes. The poetic work of Petrarch and Sidney represented a proto-Romantic preoccupation with the heroic sufferings of the poet in love, and they expressed their romantic ideas through formulaic verse. But did the form of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and the romantic philosophy of Petrarch, fit Sidney's lofty definition of what poetry and the poet should be? Did Sidney live up to his own exalted philosophical vocation of the myth-poetic prophet? Or was Sidney's adoption of the Petrarchan sequence more of a verbal exercise, a formulaic offshoot of the Scholastic Latin tradition, which was heavily entrenched in Early Modern Europe? Like many poets, Sidney set himself an impossible task and he became the protagonist of a tragedy, rather than a classical hero quest. Sidney's glory comes not through triumph, but only through the artistry of his self-inflicted pain, and through the pity of a sympathetic audience. But in this pain, Sidney does move his audience with a poetic truth that captures an important message about the human condition. Thus, Sidney does seem to embody, at least in part, his lofty poetic philosophy.

Growing out of the mytho-poetic devices of oral cultures, specifically within ancient Greece, came a conceptual tradition of "poetics" - often a formulaic activity whereby an analytical definition of poetry would be put forth followed by a discussion of how poetry worked and why it was (or wasn't) important. The two most influential poetics of the ancient world were authored by two Greek conceptual thinkers writing in a tradition that would come to be known as "philosophy: " Plato (a student of Socrates) and Plato's brilliant student-successor Aristotle. This book is a collection of famous essays on the theory of poetry from ancient Greece to 19th century England. Meno, by Plato Ion, by Plato Selections from The Republic, by Plato Chapter II Chapter III Chapter X The Poetics, by Aristotle An Apology for Poetry, by Philip Sidney Timber, by Ben Jonson Essays on Poetry, by William Wordsworth 1. Of the Principles of Poetry & The 'Lyrical Ballads ' 2. Of Poetic Diction 3. Poetry as a Study 4. Of Poetry as Observation & Description 5. Of 'The Excursion' Selections from Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge A Defence of Poetry, by P. B. Shelley

Students without motivation or vision enroll in higher education because of social pressure and the imperative to conform. They enroll not because they want to learn, nor because they want to personally develop, but because they must earn a college degree if they want a chance at a decent job and entry into the middle class. Students have become capitalists. They are clients looking to invest their economic and human capital in order to secure their future. In such an environment, education as personal development is lost. Academic capitalism is corrupting higher education, especially with the rise of new types of profit-driven institutions, which breach the academic integrity of the traditional university. Globally, for-profit programs are selling college credits, rather than offering quality higher education. This book explores the larger context of higher education in China, while also focusing on a specific case study of a for-profit international summer school program, China X.

Byron is situated between Milton, whose suffering Satan retained more than a hint of nobility even though God's ways were supposedly justified, and Nietzsche's ubermench who in suffering the laughter of rejection and the pain of alienated righteousness, destroys the old gods and brings in the new. Byron's duality is couched within a will to do and the weakness to do not - always with the hanging question, does either path really matter? This conflict keeps Byron's humanity locked, like Pascal's paradoxical pronouncement, in "a mid-point between nothing and everything." Pope could assert in the 18th century that "Man was created half to rise and half to fall," while Byron had to struggle with if humanity was created at all, and by whom, and for what purpose? The most distilled revelation of this conflicted search for meaning within, and behind, the human condition comes in Byron's confessional narrative Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1819). In this aspiring epic, Byron presents the Visionary's "compulsive search for an ideal and a perfection that do es] not exist in the world of reality...the unquenchable thirst for ideality and the dissatisfaction with reality."

Shelley took his place within the vatic history of mythopoetic bards and bore the Visionary legacy. He offered a simple "spark" of poetry to his audience while promising a raging fire would burn if the poetry was nurtured correctly. However, Shelley realized that most people cannot accept the poet's offering (for various reasons; ignoring, rejecting or misunderstanding) and they let that spark smolder into nothing. Shelley shouts into his written words, leaving his hard-earned knowledge of the human condition and his visionary plight for willing human ears. Shelley paints himself as the Visionary, sound and steady within a wisdom that understands the suffering beauty of the human condition, who sits as a "tranquil star" to burn as heavenly light. Shelley's hope is to guide humanity through the dark night of doubt and fear towards the possibility laying dormant within being human. This volume contains the fourth volume of Shelley's complete works of both poetry and prose, with an introduction by J. M. Beach. This book contains Volume 4, Shelley's collected translations. You can find Shelley's collected Volumes 1-3 published separately.

If one were to describe George Bernard Shaw's position in the history of Western thought he might be called the witty, didactic English disciple of Nietzsche as well as a devoted socialist and playwright. Shaw was very much affected by the philosophy of Nietzsche and Marx, and Romantic poets like Blake, Shelley, Whitman and Thoreau. In a sense, G. B. Shaw was a disseminator and destroyer of the Romantic tradition in the Modern era. Shaw could be called the last English Romantic poet even though most critics would be more inclined to characterize him as a "playwright," "essayist," or "political pamphleteer." But poets have often, over the ages, blurred the critical distinctions of genre and form, using and combining different mediums in which to showcase their art. Shaw, like Nietzsche, preferred the title of "creative artist" (with a scientific twist) over the prosaic and worn term of "poet: " "Like Shakespeare," Shaw wrote, "I was a born dramatist, which means a born artist-biologist." In essence Shaw saw himself a "dramatic poet," for not only was he a poet in the sense of being a visionary, but as R. J. Kaufmann wrote, he "invented an art," a dramatic style that was all his own. The book includes some of shaw's most poetic, political, philosophical, and religious plays: Candida; Selections from Man and Superman; John Bull's Other Island; Selections from Back to Methuselah; and St. Joan

Walt Whitman was a poetic Visionary. He published the first edition of this monumental work in 1855 and began his magnum opus with the words, "America does not repel the past of what it has produced." He asserted in his declaration: America is "essentially the greatest poem." And he qualified this remark by stating that the "genius of the United States," that which is at the core, the essence of the poem of America, is "always most in the common people." Whitman wrote for and about the common people, and wanted his work to somehow bring about a political renewal that would truly represent the grand Idea of democracy. In this book Whitman overturns centuries of Western political and social thought. Whitman's democratic vision was something so unprecedented in so many ways that his reception at first could be characterized as utter incomprehension. It is believed that only a couple hundred people, at most, read the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and many of these readers did not know what to make of the book. Some people were completely outraged and offended. Others were enraptured. Whitman was the self appointed poet-prophet of America and created, where he saw a lack, a new democratic religious understanding for the modern world.