With natural systems being exploited at an unsustainable rate, with technologies displacing the need for workers and now even professors, with print-based technologies undermining the intergenerational achievements in the areas of civil liberties and the cultural commons, it is now time for educational reformers to question the idea that students must be educated to become change agents. The industrial culture, now driven by digital technologies, is transforming cultures on a global scale. And they are being transformed in ways that serve the interests of environmentally destructive and profit-oriented corporations. The essays in this collection highlight reforms that teachers can introduce in classrooms––reforms that will enable students to become aware of the traditions within their own cultures that must be renewed in ways that ensure the prospects of future generations. Students must also be challenged to consider the traditions that need to be changed. The tensions between what needs to be conserved and what needs to be changed are the critical issues that will not be raised by the experts working to create a seamless world of digital communication and thought. For reasons explained in the book’s essays, this is the mindset that it habituated to constant change––a mindset with no sense of what is being lost that are sources of community self-sufficiency and empowerment.

 

 

Contents

 

Chapter 1

Introduction

 

Chapter 2

Is Transformative Learning UNESCO’s Colonizing Agenda for Global Educational Reform?

 

Chapter 3

Language Issues that Should be the Central Focus in Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies

 

Chapter 4

Toward an Ecologically Informed Paradigm for Thinking about Educational Reforms

 

Chapter 5

One of the Political Legacies of Print-Dominated Thinking: Ayn Rand’s Justification of the Pursuit of a Life of Selfishness

 

Chapter 6

How the Coming Online Revolution in Higher Education will Lead to the Elimination of Faculty

 

Chapter 7

Is Using Computers in the Classrooms of Oral/Tradition-Centered Cultures an Affirming Technology or a Trojan Horse?

 

Chapter 8

Rethinking Social Justice Issues within an Eco-Justice Conceptual and Moral Framework

 

Chapter 9

The Occupy Movement and the Cultural Commons: A Missed Opportunity

 

 

 

ISBN 978-0-9891296-1-9  (Paperback)

978-0-9891296-2-6 (e-book)