As 2017 dawns, our thoughts naturally turn to… our book club, and reading together!
During the end of 2016 we read We Make the Road by Walking, a major and inspiring work on education. Readers commented in response to blog posts here, tweeted up a storm, created images, web apps, and bots. Earlier in the year we read three near-future science fiction novels. which gave us glimpses of education’s possibilities in the context of transformed societies. In previous years we’ve read other books on education, media, and society.
So what next?
We could read another book about education. Several recent titles have come up in conversations of late, all with living authors we might connect with via social media or video. I could invite them to be guests on the Future Trends Forum, too:
- Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. A new study of the for-profit sector in the context of privatization and rising inequality.
- Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. How affordable is college education, and why is it so often not?
- Chris Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Focuses on the defunding of American public higher education.
- Jeff Selingo, College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students. A critical examination of higher ed in transformation.
Or we could add technology to our educational exploration:
- Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology. Explores how education changes to prepare students for technological shifts.
- Allan Collins, Richard Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. A Columbia Teachers’ College Press book about how education can change to best respond to technology.
- Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli, Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education. A serious look on connected learning, co-authored by a Future Trends Forum guest, and in its third edition.
We could also change register and read another work of science fiction. The crowdsourced list of titles is very rich. From them, here are some of the more popular ones based on comments and polling:
- Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road
- Cory Doctorow, For the Win
- Will McIntosh, Soft Apocalypse
- Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
- Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning
- Mark Russinovich, Zero Day
- Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story
- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
- Daniel Suarez, Daemon
- Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
- Andy Weir, The Martian
For my part, I’ll commit to setting up a reading schedule, blogging notes and questions, and spurring a Twitter discussion.
What would you like to do, oh brilliant readers?
I think it would be great for all to read Lawrence LeShans’s “An Ethic for an Age of Space”. I have always found strikingly simple and brilliant observations in LeShans work, so simple and effective that many people don’t even notice it!
I’ve never seen that before, Finnur.
Does it bridge science fiction and education?
The Newfield is probably directly relevant to me at this point.
Good to know.
His previous book also covers this.
And I’m still going to sound the trumpet for “2030”. It’s totally not what people would expect.
One education suggestion: Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society which has a copy online here: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html
One science fiction: Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman (part of trilogy, but works as a standalone). This has proven to be the best apocalypse book I have ever read because it is so good at imagining very completely the routine and everyday consequences in every day life.
One alt selection: Clark Aldrich’s Unschooling Rules. Aldrich has another career as a consultant to companies using what he calls small sims, but I have given this book to unschoolers and have recommended it along with Holt and Gatto. Primo stuff.
Greetings, Terry, and thank you for the suggestions.
Good to see Illich’s classic text online.
Agreed about Ben Winters. The first and third books in particular. I’m driving across NH today, actually, coincidentally.
Hail to Thee, O Brilliant Readers!
Nobody else as to join me in my boredom with teacher talk because you are all probably still in active service, and I am retired and have earned my ennui with the topic! I have become irrelevant, so ignore me on that topic…:)
My pick for a science fiction book comes at the recommendation of sf writer Molly Gloss, who was on the Tiptree Award jury when the top spot went unanimously to Light, by M John Harrison. Here’s the blurb from amazon.com:
“In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.
In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’ t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself.
In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.”
What caught my attention in the write-up above is the woman, “Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat.” Talk about ye olde homage to the master! Meaning Cordwainer Smith, of course.
I hear it is a dark and beautifully written book–any other takers?
I liked Light very much, and am a burgeoning Harrison fan.
I’m new to this space and just learning about the book club. I’m excited! I’ll go with whatever is selected, Just looking forward to participating.
Welcome, leighahall! Very glad to see you here.
My vote is for Sara Goldrick-Rab or Tressie McMillan Cottom’s books.
Thank you, John.
I have three science fiction suggestions. None are recent novels, but each has relevance to the present.
1: Orbital Resonance, John Barnes. To what extent can one generation steer the next, even with total control over the environment, including the educational system? Can one generation really raise another to escape the past? I’m still not sure how I feel about some of the ideas in this book, which is part of why I recommend it.
2: The Player of Games, Iain Banks. What is “meaningful work” in a post-scarcity economy where nearly all necessary tasks are automated? Also contains some sharp observations about gender, language, and culture.
3: Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan. Another post-scarcity novel, this one a bit more light-hearted with space opera elements. Also, like Orbital Resonance, explores the potential value of a break with previous culture, including some (slightly implausibly effective) Socratic Method teaching robots. Takes a more libertarian stance than The Player of Games.
If you’re still thinking about non-fiction, may I suggest The Soft Revolution, by Postman & Weingartner? Sometimes it’s interesting to see how conversations can be cyclical.
Or, a very interesting follow up to Horton & Friere could be Michael Schiro’s Curriculum Theory. I especially like this book because of the evenhanded portrayal it provides of different philosophies of learning, their adherents, and their purposes. One can finish this book just as firmly committed to ones philosophy as before, but with a far greater understanding and even appreciation of other philosophies in their own contexts. I think we generally need more works like this to help us communicate across differences, especially in understanding how different groups can use the same words to mean very different ideas.
Terrific suggestions, Elizabeth.
I can’t remember if I read Orbital Resonance, but I like Barnes.
so many excellent choices already on the list and more put forth — here’s another not-new but timelier than when published (I put it on my mental list then), recommended by Cory Doctorow: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America,, https://boingboing.net/2007/01/08/roths-plot-against-a.html
I’ve been meaning to read that. Very ambitious book. Quite the George W. Bush admin document, too.
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