NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die. "It may be nonfiction, but Into the Wild is a mystery of the highest order." —Entertainment Weekly McCandess had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Not long after, he was dead. Into the Wild is the mesmerizing, heartbreaking tale of an enigmatic young man who goes missing in the wild and whose story captured the world’s attention. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild. Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interest that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding—and not an ounce of sentimentality. Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

The low demonstrable effect of education research done in South Africa in particular – and Africa in general – continues to be a problem in scientific records in the educational sciences. This scholarly collected work addresses this obstacle and focuses on recommendations from scholars in different sectorial categories in the field of education. Scholars from a variety of sub-fields within the educational sciences reflect on this particular matter, revisiting the history of research and research outcomes and offering informed recommendations based on in-depth investigation and analysis of aspects of the various discourses within the relevant sub-fields. The scope of the content of this collected work centres on the issue of the lack of scientific records concerning the scientific raising of the impact of education research. The book aims at making a specific contribution to the educational sciences by stimulating scholarly discussion around how to increase the recording of the significance of educational research done in Africa, and in South Africa in particular, and to redirect the research agenda into the direction of making more impact. Impact is conceptualised to mean both scholarly impact (that is being cited and being used as foundation for theory building and for further research) and practical impact (that is improvement of practice, teaching and learning in education institutions at all levels).

This book explores the evolution and current state of the scholarly field of comparative and international education over 200 years of development. Experts in the field explore comparative and international education in each of the major world regions.

This primer for teachers (prospective and practicing) asks readers to question the historical present and their relation to it, and in so doing, to construct their own understandings of what it means to teach, to study, to become "educated" in the present moment. Curriculum theory is the scholarly effort – inspired by theory in the humanities, arts and interpretive social sciences – to understand the curriculum, defined here as "complicated conversation." Rather than the formulation of objectives to be evaluated by (especially standardized) tests, curriculum is communication informed by academic knowledge, and it is characterized by educational experience. Pinar recasts school reform as school deform in which educational institutions devolve into cram schools preparing for standardized exams, and traces the history of this catastrophe starting in 1950s. Changes in the Second Edition: Introduces Pinar’s formulation of allegories-of-the-present — a concept in which subjectivity, history, and society become articulated through the teacher’s participation in the complicated conversation that is the curriculum; features a new chapter on Weimar Germany (as an allegory of the present); includes new chapters on the future, and on the promises and risks of technology.