"Escaping Education challenges the modern certainly that education is a universal good and a human right. It opens doors to alternative landscapes of learning and living that still flourish at the grassroots, within the cultures of the uneducated, the undereducated, and the illiterate who constitute the social majorities or the Two-Thirds World. It celebrates the richness of their traditions, their pluriverse or commons, common sense, and communal teaching, keeping at bay the modern reign of homo oeconomicus and homo educandus, Standing the all-too-familiar tale of education on its head, it joins the regeneration of soil cultures, resisting cultural meltdown in the global classroom."--BOOK JACKET.

The brilliant English writer Christopher Derrick presents a disturbing indictment of today's colleges and universities and the troubled condition of liberal education. The occasion for his writing this book was a visit to Thomas Aquinas College in California which deeply impressed Derrick with its true liberal and Catholic education. This small independent college convinced him of the need for reform in Catholic higher education today, and he uses the example of this college as the way this reform should be carried out. "This book is comparable to Newman's Idea of a University. Derrick has wit and a brilliant aphoristic style. This book could well serve as a manual for the reform of Catholic higher education today." -Paul Hallet, The National Catholic Register

A Nobel Prize–winning economist tells the remarkable story of how the world has grown healthier, wealthier, but also more unequal over the past two and half centuries The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton—one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty—tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world. Deaton takes an in-depth look at the historical and ongoing patterns behind the health and wealth of nations, and addresses what needs to be done to help those left behind. Deaton describes vast innovations and wrenching setbacks: the successes of antibiotics, pest control, vaccinations, and clean water on the one hand, and disastrous famines and the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the other. He examines the United States, a nation that has prospered but is today experiencing slower growth and increasing inequality. He also considers how economic growth in India and China has improved the lives of more than a billion people. Deaton argues that international aid has been ineffective and even harmful. He suggests alternative efforts—including reforming incentives to drug companies and lifting trade restrictions—that will allow the developing world to bring about its own Great Escape. Demonstrating how changes in health and living standards have transformed our lives, The Great Escape is a powerful guide to addressing the well-being of all nations.

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.

When an earthquake hits on their family vacation, can Kyle and his sister survive the following tsunami? The Worst Vacation Ever! Thirteen-year-old Kyle thought spending a vacation on the Oregon coast with his family would be great. He’d never flown before, and he’s never seen the Pacific Ocean. One evening Kyle is left in charge of his younger sister, BeeBee, while his parents attend an adults-only Salesman of the Year dinner on an elegant yacht. Then the earthquake comes—starting a fire in their hotel! As Kyle and BeeBee fight their way out through smoke and flame, Kyle remembers the sign at the beach that said after an earthquake everyone should go uphill and inland, as far from the ocean as possible. Giant tsunami waves—three or four stories high—can ride in from the sea and engulf anyone who doesn’t escape fast enough. Kyle and BeeBee flee uphill as a tsunami crashes over the beach, the hotel, and the town. The giant wave charges straight up the hillside and through the woods where the children are running for their lives. The perfect vacation has become a nightmare! Somehow Kyle and BeeBee have to outwit nature’s fury and save themselves from tsunami terror.

The third edition of this groundbreaking text offers a powerful model for cultural ecological analysis and a pedagogy of responsibility. Authors Martusewicz, Edmundson, and Lupinacci provide teachers, teacher educators, and educational scholars with the theory and classroom practices they need to help develop citizens who are prepared to support and achieve diverse, democratic, and sustainable societies in an increasingly globalized world. Readers are asked to consider curricular strategies to bring these issues to life in their own classrooms across disciplines. Designed for introductory educational foundations and multicultural education courses, EcoJustice Education is written in a narrative, conversational style grounded in place and experience, but also pushes students to examine the larger ideological, social, historical, and political contexts of the crises humans and the planet we inhabit are facing. Fully updated with cutting-edge research, statistics, and current events throughout, the third edition addresses important topics such as Indigenous learning, Black Lives Matter, the Flint Water Crisis, Standing Rock, the rise of fascism, and climate change, and develops EcoJustice approaches to confronting these issues. An accompanying online resource includes a conceptual toolbox, links to related resources, and more.