New Era - New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education

by F. Joseph Merlino, Deborah Pomeroy

Overview

New Era – New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education explores the unprecedented realities and challenges associated with entering a new era, such as catastrophic climate changes, advanced artificial intelligence, massive demographic shifts, and worldwide digital disinformation campaigns.. This era calls for a new urgency in thinking about how we will educate present and future generations of young people. This book is divided into four parts; Part I describes the profound social, technological, and demographic changes that have occurred over four hundred years since the first English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia. Part II describes four shadows that have served to corrupt these purposes of education: extreme wealth inequality, nativism, white supremacy, and anti-intellectualism. Part III explores the illusions of educational reform that have over-promised college and career success, created an idolatry of math test scores, conflated memorization of facts with conceptual understanding, and confused multiple layers of policy agendas with progress. Part IV depicts F. Joseph Merlino and Deborah Pomeroy’s twelve years of experience in Egypt, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkey, and the U.S. in helping to craft new purposes of education for model schools in their countries that reflect their aspirations for a new generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666949773
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	03/29/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	420
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

F. Joseph Merlino is president of The 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education, (21PSTEM), a non-profit research and action organization.

Deborah Pomeroy is professor emeritus of science education at Arcadia University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: New Era - New Purpose

Part I: Change and the Purposes of Education

Chapter 1: The Landing, Early Colonial America - (1620-1700)

Chapter 2: The Colonies Become a Nation - (1700-1790)

Chapter 3: The First Agro-Industrial Revolution – (1790 – 1870)

Chapter 4: The Second Industrial Revolution - (1870-1945)

Chapter 5: The Rise of the American Empire - (1945- Present)

Part II: The Corruption of Purpose

Chapter 6: Wealth, Education and the Cycles of Privilege and Poverty

Chapter 7: White Protestant Nativism and “Otherness”

Chapter 8: The Discovery Doctrine and the Shadow of White Supremacy

Chapter 9: Religionists’ Claims Against Science and Other Deniers

Part III: The Promises and Illusions of Educational Reform

Chapter 10: The Promises and Illusions of “College Career and Success”

Chapter 11: The Math Wars

Chapter 12: The Illusion that Activity Equals Progress

Chapter 13: The Turning Point

Part IV: Repurposing Education for a New Era

Chapter 14: Welcome to the Dream, Reda Abou Serie and Hala El-Serafy

Chapter 15: The Design of the Grand Challenges Curriculum, Reda Abou Serie and Hala El-Serafy

Chapter 16: Higher Education, the Teacher Preparation Cycle, and Grappling with Tradition, Reda Abou Serie and Hala El-Serafy

Chapter 17: Repurposing Education Beyond the Egyptian Experience

Chapter 18: The New Urgency

Bibliography

About the Authors

Editorial Reviews

United in an effort steeped in academic practice and research methodologies, authors F. Joseph Merlino and Deborah Pomeroy untangle the decades long conundrum of deciphering what education is today, from whence it historically came, and how it should be adjusted to accommodate myriad social iterations and the constantly changing needs of its recipients. In working with international teaching professionals, interacting with thousands of students, testing, and retesting over an extended time frame, they dissect old standards and have reconstructed a vision of education for the new era, all the while recognizing the urgency that have perplexed so many for decades. New Era – New Urgency is a read that not only belongs on the bookshelves of every reforming educator, but one that presents ideas that set the bar significantly high to incite and direct future outcomes for needed change.

Gary A. Lauresen

Policymakers, Educators, and the public would do well to understand and work to implement a new purpose-driven education described by the authors in New Era – New Urgency. What they describe here is not theoretical, they have developed and ‘test-driven’ this new vision for education in schools with students and teachers. An important contribution of this book is to understand more fully the changing purposes of American education in a nation lurching, painfully at times, toward “a more perfect union.”

Charles Coble

This hardcover edition of New Era - New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education from Lexington Books will prove of special interest to readers concerned with the issues relevant to how education and educational institutions can best prepare us for the on-coming and inevitable impacts of the physical, political, technological, economic, and cultural global changes — especially those that will be generated by dramatic climate change and the advances of artificial intelligence. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, New Era - New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, governmental, and college/university library Contemporary Educational Theory & Practice collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.

Midwest Book Review

What a fascinating read and a thoughtful recommendation for education in the United States and beyond… ensuring that education has a locally-driven purpose for all participants, especially students, teachers, administrators and parents. Authors Merlino and Pomeroy recount centuries of changed purposes in American education as well as issues that have bedeviled, and continue to weaken, educational success for many. Out of this history, the authors – active supporters of education here and abroad – come to a notable success in a foreign context and lead us to the possibilities that readers might take as their own.

James Hamos

This is an incredible book that shares the important work of transforming school systems to empower students with critical thinking. I learned a great deal about history, culture, and educational change.

Jo Boaler

In New Era – New Urgency, F. Joseph Merlino and Deborah Pomeroy share their expansive understanding of the foundations of American education and their experience with creating educational programs for 21st Century teachers and learners. This book is logically organized and beautifully written. It takes the reader through the earliest years of American education and the various purposes of education as they evolved. The authors go on to identify ways in which those purposes have been corrupted, with interesting sections on the roles that wealth distribution and religion, among others, played out to bring about this corruption. Merlino and Pomeroy describe, in depth, their experiences in working with Egypt, Bosnia, and American schools, focused on STEM curriculum. This book makes a compelling case for changes that need to be made in America’s education system and is a must read for education professionals who wish to eschew traditional methods of teaching that continue to pervade American schools.

Preston Feden