This Living Hand by Edmund Morris
For over 30 years we have been in the midst of a paradox. Following a questionable logic that sees education as a means to economic ends, efforts to reform education have focused on keeping the US from slipping in international economic competition. Relying on testing as a standard, in the end we may have decreased our human potential and become less competitive. Our system has gotten worse at its core, in its philosophical tenets and in its ultimate effects, by placing unwonted pressure on our youth and in stifling their creativity. While this goes back decades, Respect for Teachers takes its title from a phrase --perhaps a codeword-- in President's 2011 State of the Union address and sits down to consider its implications. Connecting attacks on teachers, unions and schools and the misrepresentation of research to the promotion of new economic models in education, it suggests that the Obama administration may be, without quite realizing it, setting the stage for rapid privatization of the public system. As this endangers the egalitarian basis of democracy, it also reminds us that schooling is big business - many trillions of dollars world-wide. Joseph Schumpeter once said, No bourgeoisie ever disliked war profits. Respect operates under the premise that no bourgeoisie ever disliked the spoils of school reform, either.
Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and attended college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, Theodore Rex, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2001. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan's authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He then completed his trilogy on the life of the twenty-sixth president with Colonel Roosevelt, also a bestseller, and has published Beethoven: The Universal Composer and This Living Hand and Other Essays. Edison is his final work of biography. He was married to fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris for fifty-two years. Edmund Morris died in 2019.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780812983227 |
| ISBN 10 | 081298322X |
| Title | This Living Hand |
| Author | Edmund Morris |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 2013-12-10 |
| Number of pages | 528 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |