New Era – New Urgency : The Case for Repurposing Education

This book charts the historical evolutions in US education, showing where it has gone wrong, and setting out a vision for how education must adapt in our present era of political, economic, cultural, technological and climate change.

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.