New Books in Education

Colin Calloway is one of the leading historians of Native American history today and an award- winning author. Calloway is the John Kimball, Jr. 1943 Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hanover, and has been part of the institution for several decades.  He has published a textbook, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which has a fourth edition published in 2012. Not surprisingly, he has also published a fascinating new work entitled Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).  When we think about the history of Indian education, we may think about the broad legacy of educating Native Americans at boarding schools from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century, or more specifically about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, or Native American educational program that existed at Hampton University, the historically black college in Virginia.  However, Calloway covers a much older legacy of Native American education rooted in the eighteenth-century, and continues to the present-day at Dartmouth College. As an alumna of the College, I was always fascinated by the “Indian history” at this institution. Some current ways the college pays homage to its original mission include recruiting Native American students, supporting academic and student resources, such as the Native American Studies department, and the Native American Program which hosts college-wide events, such as the upcoming 40th annual Pow Wow held in May.  Calloway’s book provides greater insight into understanding how the shadows of Dartmouth’s complicated colonial history of Native American education are viewed today.  Listen in to learn more about this fascinating study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Many parents are interested in learning about how their children develop, and pretty much all parents want to do a good job with their kids. So, often they turn to parenting books. Unfortunately, many books for parents do not present the developmental research accurately, probably because the authors of those books are trying to find a way to sell more books. Parents can be left feeling confused and anxious that they aren’t doing things the “right” way, and often the more books they read the more confused and anxious they feel! That is why the book Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College (Bloomsbury, 2011), by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, is refreshing. Aamodt and Wang present child development in an accessible, balanced, and reassuring way that is true to the current research about child development. The book covers everything from infant learning, to language development, to sleep, to social development, all the way from the prenatal phase through adolescence. This work is will interest those who want to know more about the neuroscience of child development, as well as parents who just want to understand their children better and learn a few reasonable tips. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Jesse Rhodes‘ book An Education in Politics: The Origin and Evolution of No Child Left Behind (Cornell University Press, 2012). The book synthesizes nearly forty years of US political history. It tells the story of the development and passage of the No Child Left Behind law by George W. Bush. The book builds on political science theories of political entrepreneurship, institutionalism, and incrementalism to narrate the debate about education reform. Rhodes captures the people, the organizations, and the institutions that have defined education policy since the 1980s. The book is accessible, thorough, and a must read for scholars of education politics and policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture, and college football has long been regarded as the one sport that best demonstrates American values. For outsiders, a useful analogy to understand American college football’s popularity and cultural importance might be European football. Like the soccer clubs of Europe, many college football teams date back to the 19th century, with long-standing rivalries and traditions. The teams have unbreakable connections to particular localities, unlike American professional franchises that are sold, bought, and moved. Generations of supporters attend Saturday games at storied grounds. Dressed in team colors, they sing songs and perform other time-honored rituals. And like European football, American college football is still fundamentally regional in organization. Teams compete in various leagues, planted in specific parts of the country, with the top teams in the table advancing to national games. College football fans tend to identify with the teams of their own regional league, arguing vigorously that “our” brand of football is better than “theirs.” Of course, American college football teams are also like European soccer clubs in that they bring in a lot of money, from tickets, television, and branded merchandise. According to one estimate, the top programs in American college football–if they could ever be sold–would be worth as much as clubs like Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Olympique Lyon. But of course, these teams can’t be sold. Even though they draw hundreds of thousands of spectators in the fall season, millions of television viewers, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue, college football teams are the property of institutions of higher education, many of which are public, taxpayer-funded entities. Other nations have sports teams affiliated with universities. But only in the United States have college athletics become such a prominent part of the sports landscape. The history of how this curious system emerged is surprising. In his book The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), Brian Ingrassia shows that the early history of American football and the early history of the American university were intertwined. As universities developed, and faculties and administrators sought to give them a public face, they saw football as a means of gaining the allegiance of people who would likely never visit a lecture hall or laboratory. They argued that football was beneficial to players and spectators alike. There were critics who warned of the dangers of football, and for a brief time in the early 20thcentury some West Coast schools even adopted rugby as an alternative. But by the Twenties and Thirties college football was firmly established and hugely popular across the country. Snobby academics today will grumble about the scourge of big-time college football. However, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the whole manipulative advertising thing – it has a rather more nefarious history in the United States, bound intimately, like so much, with the question of race. The before-and-after pictures were a favorite of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the pioneering Carlisle Indian School, where in the late 19th and early 20th century, Native American children from the recently pacified West were brought thousands of miles to a military base outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Haggard by the exhausting and traumatic train ride, Pratt’s photographer would snap the “before” picture, using props and bad lighting to emphasize the alleged “savagery” of the newly arrived children. Months later, once the students were fitted in contemporary Euroamerican fashion, their hair cut short, and illuminated by soft-lighting, the “after” photo was snapped. These dual images – attesting to the supposedly civilizing effects of the boarding school – were distributed to government elites and the American public, proof that the indigenous population of the continent could be molded in the image of the white settler. In his impressive new book, The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (University of New Mexico Press, 2011) Hayes Peter Mauro brings to bear his considerable skills as an art historian and critical theorist to deconstruct the visual culture produced at Carlisle. Placing them squarely in the context of triumphalist American myths and the popular pseudo-science of race, Mauro uses these photographs to ask powerful questions and arrive at some unsettling answers. It is a fascinating work, illuminating not only the troubling culture of the federal assimilation project, but the power of the image to mold both the observer and the observed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In her new book The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For (Ivan R. Dee, 2011), Naomi Schaefer Riley, former Wall Street Journal editor and affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, critically examines the tenure system. She believes “tenure . . . is eroding American education from the inside out” and places too much emphasis on research and not enough on teaching. In our interview, we talked about why tenure does not help students get a better education, why faculty donations went 8:1 in favor of Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and how much the government spends to subsidize academic articles. Read all about it, and more, in Riley’s provocative new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In his new book, Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2011), David Feith, Chairman of the Civic Education Initiative and assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal, worked with some of America’s top education experts to address the problem of widespread civic illiteracy. Feith assembled 23 different educational experts, including a former Education Secretary, Supreme Court Justice, and two Senators, to address the question of how to improve civic education in the U.S. The result is a thorough analysis of civic illiteracy and its causes, as well as a host of suggestions for how to fix the problem. In our interview, we talked about how Feith came up with the idea to promote civic education in his college dorm room, whether U.S. schools have the capacity to impart the type of education necessary to do the job, and what the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements can tell us about the state of civic education in America.  Read all about it, and more, in Feith’s eye-opening new book. Please become a fan of “New Books in Public Policy” on Facebook, if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Despite its focus on education, Sally Ninham‘s recent book, A Cohort of Pioneers: Australian Postgraduate Students and American PostgraduateDegrees, 1949-1964 (Connor Court Publishing, 2011), covers a lot of ground: the waning of Australian-British ties, the rise of Australian identity, post-war Australian-US relations, and much more. The book is also personal: it details her own family’s experiences as young professionals studying in the United States after the Second World War. The discovery of a cache of family letters led her to consider how and why Australians went to study in the United States, and how the experience transformed Australia’s own higher education system and politics in subsequent decades. For the Australian students, American education opened the prospect of an Australia less dependent upon the United Kingdom. For the United States, then fighting the Cold War, Australian students opened the prospect of closer ties to Australia, an important ally. The book, which is built on an impressive body of oral history interviews, personal letters, and memoirs, is both an important cultural document and a very readable intellectual history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In his new book, The Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender, and Education in the Age of the “New” Racism and Patriarchy (Peter Lang, 2010), Pierre Orelus analyzes the “heartfelt stories of fifty men of African descent who vary in age, social class, family status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and ability” (1). One of the purposes of the book is to allow black men to share how they both perpetuate and are negatively impacted by heteronormativity, that is, the oppression of women and other men on the basis of how well they perform heterosexuality. During my interview with Pierre, I was surprised that he labeled some of the men as closeted bisexuals and homosexuals simply because they did not disclose their sexualities to him. This was surprising since the book itself seeks to undo heteronormativity, which enforces the requirement to announce a heterosexual identity. This announcement is made both by how a man performs his masculinity, and in his actual sex life. Since the bedroom is private (we don’t know who people actually have sex with), one is supposed to feel unrestrained in disclosing his sexual practice by stating that he is heterosexual. If a man doesn’t make this pronouncement, he is deemed non-normative (otherwise, it’s assumed that he would proudly proclaim his straightness). What’s more, Orelus gives the men the choice to remain silent regarding their sexuality, yet when some take the option, it is read as a fear of coming out. This may be an instance when Orelus himself perpetuates the exact crisis he hopes to end. This isn’t a criticism of this good book. Orelus begins by placing himself as a subject of analysis. He states that he has his own ongoing personal struggle with patriarchy, a fact often brought to his attention by his wife. It’s this experience he shares with other black men that prompted him to write the book. Please, listen in to our discussion of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?” Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam. How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur’s answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we–or rather I–thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the “identity studies” courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn’t harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the “identity studies” disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue. This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education