This study identifies key lessons about the strategic objectives and directions which should form a frame for policy development in the US, including policy on adult learning and schooling.

An award-winning journalist and literacy advocate provides a clear, step-by-step guide to helping your child thrive as a reader and a learner. When her child went off to school, Maya Smart was shocked to discover that a good education in America is a long shot, in ways that few parents fully appreciate. Our current approach to literacy offers too little, too late, and attempting to play catch-up when our kids get to kindergarten can no longer be our default strategy. We have to start at the top. The brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy, and early language experiences are critical to building it. That means parents’ work as children’s first teachers begins from day one too—and we need deeper knowledge to play our positions. Reading for Our Lives challenges the bath-book-bed mantra and the idea that reading aloud to our kids is enough to ensure school readiness. Instead, it gives parents easy, immediate, and accessible ways to nurture language and literacy development from the start. Through personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips, this book presents the life-and-death urgency of literacy, investigates inequity in reading achievement, and illuminates a path to a true, transformative education for all.

Global Networks, Local Actions: Rethinking adult education policy in the 21st century examines public policy developments in adult education, exploring the policy framing of adult education practice in a range of socio-cultural contexts, and contributing to the development of policy research from global and comparative perspectives. Drawing from multidisciplinary fields such as adult education, comparative and international education, and sociology, chapters analyse empirically grounded studies from the US, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. Each study helps to identify how political agents interact at international, regional, national and local scales, and what the implications are for publically-funded interventions in adult education. While this book recognises the complexity of adult education policy, it argues for the need to deconstruct the false belief that what is global in adult education may be intrinsically distinct from the characteristics of geographical or social territories in which adult education occurs. Instead, it points to localised norms and ideas on Adult Basic and Secondary Education as ultimately contained in, and constituting, what is at times perceived as global, or abstracted from definite geographical or social territories. This book calls for a global sociology of adult education in response to global challenges, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of developments in public adult education policy. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of adult education, comparative and international education, education policy and politics, sociology of education, and global studies.

The focus of the book is the cost of empire, particularly the cost in the American case – the internal burden of American global leadership. The book builds an argument about the propensity of external responsibilities to undermine the internal strength, raising the question of the link between weakening and the global spread of American power.

For more than a century, the United States has been the world's most powerful state. Now some analysts predict that China will soon take its place. Does this mean that we are living in a post-American world? Will China's rapid rise spark a new Cold War between the two titans? In this compelling essay, world renowned foreign policy analyst, Joseph Nye, explains why the American century is far from over and what the US must do to retain its lead in an era of increasingly diffuse power politics. America's superpower status may well be tempered by its own domestic problems and China's economic boom, he argues, but its military, economic and soft power capabilities will continue to outstrip those of its closest rivals for decades to come.

In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was published; a wildly popular book that drew attention to the shift in American culture away from the tenants that made America—and Americans—unique. Bloom focused on a breakdown in the American curriculum, but many sensed that the issue affected more than education. The very essence of what it meant to be an American was disappearing. That was over twenty years ago. Since then, the United States has experienced unprecedented wealth, more youth enrolling in higher education than ever before, and technology advancements far beyond what many in the 1980s dreamed possible. And yet, the state of the American mind seems to have deteriorated further. Benjamin Franklin’s “self-made man” has become a man dependent on the state. Independence has turned into self-absorption. Liberty has been curtailed in the defense of multiculturalism. In order to fully grasp the underpinnings of this shift away from the self-reliant, well-informed American, editors Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow have brought together a group of cultural and educational experts to discuss the root causes of the decline of the American mind. The writers of these fifteen original essays include E. D. Hirsch, Nicholas Eberstadt, and Dennis Prager, as well as Daniel Dreisbach, Gerald Graff, Richard Arum, Robert Whitaker, David T. Z. Mindich, Maggie Jackson, Jean Twenge, Jonathan Kay, Ilya Somin, Steve Wasserman, Greg Lukianoff, and R. R. Reno. Their essays are compiled into three main categories: States of Mind: Indicators of Intellectual and Cognitive Decline These essays broach specific mental deficiencies among the population, including lagging cultural IQ, low Biblical literacy, poor writing skills, and over-medication. Personal and Cognitive Habits/Interests These essays turn to specific mental behaviors and interests, including avoidance of the news, short attention spans, narcissism, and conspiracy obsessions. National Consequences These essays examine broader trends affecting populations and institutions, including rates of entitlement claims, voting habits, and a low-performing higher education system. The State of the American Mind is both an assessment of our current state as well as a warning, foretelling what we may yet become. For anyone interested in the intellectual fate of America, The State of the American Mind offers an accessible and critical look at life in America and how our collective mind is faring.

2021 ASHE/CIHE Award for Significant Research on International Higher Education U.S. Power in International Higher Education explores how internationalization in higher education is not just an educational endeavor, but also a geopolitical one. By centering and making explicit the role of power, the book demonstrates the United States’s advantage in international education as well as the changing geopolitical realities that will shape the field in the future. The chapter authors are leading critical scholars of international higher education, with diverse scholarly ties and professional experiences within the country and abroad. Taken together, the chapters provide broad trends as well as in-depth accounts about how power is evident across a range of key international activities. This book is intended for higher education scholars and practitioners with the aim of raising greater awareness on the unequal power dynamics in internationalization activities and for the purposes of promoting more just practices in higher education globally.