Michael Fielding looks at what the Labour Government has achieved in the last four years with its policy of 'education, education, education'. There has been widespread disappointment in New Labour's education policies, which on the whole have not steered too far wide of those put in place by Margaret Thatcher, including issues of marketisation, testing and performativity. Michael Fielding has called on the key policy thinkers in education to offer their opinions on what has happened in education over the first three to four years of the New Labour Government. Education policy is a controversial subject and with a General Election expected within the next few months, this book will be read widely by people within education, politicians and journalists and by others anxious to get to facts and avoid the spin. The subject matter and the presence of so many high profile educationalists make this an essential read.

Arguing against the tougher standards rhetoric that marks the current education debate, the author of No Contest and Punished by Rewards writes that such tactics squeeze the pleasure out of learning. Reprint.

The authors chart a middle course in our war over religion and public education, one that builds on a developing national consensus among educational and religious leaders. While it is not proper for schools to practice religion or proselytize, neither is it permissible to make them religion-free zones. Schools do not take religion seriously, as the authors' review of textbooks and the new national content standards makes clear. In Part One, they outline the civic, constitutional, and educational frameworks that should shape the treatment of religion in the curriculum and classroom. In Part Two, they explore major issues relating to religion in different domains of the curriculum in elementary education and in middle and high school courses in history, civics, economics, literature, and the sciences. They also discuss Bible courses and world religions courses and explore the relationship of religion to moral education and sex education. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.

A leading economist's exploration of what our economic arrangements might look like if we applied basic principles without ideological blinders. There is nothing wrong with economics, Dean Baker contends, but economists routinely ignore their own principles when it comes to economic policy. What would policy look like if we took basic principles of mainstream economics seriously and applied them consistently? In the debate over regulation, for example, Baker—one of the few economists who predicted the meltdown of fall 2008—points out that ideological blinders have obscured the fact there is no “free market” to protect. Modern markets are highly regulated, although intrusive regulations such as copyright and patents are rarely viewed as regulatory devices. If we admit the extent to which the economy is and will be regulated, we have many more options in designing policy and deciding who benefits from it. On health care reform, Baker complains that economists ignore another basic idea: marginal cost pricing. Unlike all other industries, medical services are priced extraordinarily high, far above the cost of production, yet that discrepancy is rarely addressed in the debate about health care reform. What if we applied marginal cost pricing—making doctors' wages competitive and charging less for prescription drugs and tests such as MRIs? Taking Economics Seriously offers an alternative Econ 101. It introduces economic principles and thinks through what we might gain if we free ourselves from ideological blinders and get back to basics in the most troubled parts of our economy.

A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasnt about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humour, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.