Education Philosophy

Created by Olly Richards, language teacher and author, Western Philosophy in Simple Spanish gives you an experience in real Spanish that you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll be better prepared for using Spanish in the real world, speak with more confidence, and take a giant leap towards fluency in Spanish!

How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? This audiobook version of a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, read by his sister, Amy Wallace-Havens, captures his electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

Somehow, deeply conservative assumptions about how children behave and how parents raise them have become the conventional wisdom in our society. It's widely assumed that parents are both permissive and overprotective, unable to set limits and afraid to let their kids fail. We're told that young people receive trophies, praise, and A's too easily, and suffer from inflated self-esteem and insufficient self-discipline. However, complaints about pushover parents and entitled kids are actually decades old and driven, it turns out, by ideology more than evidence.

The sun's family of planets become a familiar place in this personal account of the lives of other worlds. Sobel explores the planets' origins and oddities through the lens of popular culture, from astrology, mythology, and science fiction to art, music, poetry, biography, and history. This intimate account is filled with fascination, beauty, and surprise.

In this forceful manifesto, Hirsch argues that children in the US are being deprived of the basic knowledge that would enable them to function in contemporary society. Includes 5,000 essential facts to know.

Using straightforward definitions and clear text, How Psychology Works makes the workings of the brain easy to understand and shows what happens when things go wrong, with information on disorders such as anxiety and paranoia, as well as explanations of the different therapies that are used to treat them, from CBT to psychoanalysis, group therapy to art therapy. Clear and easy to understand for both students and listeners with a general interest, this audiobook explores and explains the various approaches that psychologists use to study how people think and behave.

In Hacking Leadership, award-winning school administrators Joe Sanfelippo and Tony Sinanis demonstrate how to increase learning by leaving the office and engaging directly with all teachers and learners. They identify 10 problems with school leadership and provide dynamic, right-now solutions.

The term "home economics" may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the 20th century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and businesspeople. And it has something to teach us today. Danielle Dreilinger traces the field's history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies.

More than two decades after teaching English during the early part of China’s economic boom, an experience chronicled in his book River Town, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan Province to instruct students from the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with many of the people he had taught in the 1990s.

What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall". On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox.

E. D. Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit, draws on recent findings in neuroscience and data from France to provide new evidence for the argument that a carefully planned, knowledge-based elementary curriculum is essential to providing the foundations for children's life success and ensuring equal opportunity for students of all backgrounds. In the absence of a clear, common curriculum, Hirsch contends that tests are reduced to measuring skills rather than content, and that students from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot develop the knowledge base to support high achievement.

Culturally Responsive School Leadership focuses on how school leaders can effectively serve minoritized students - those who have been historically marginalized in school and society. The book demonstrates how leaders can engage students, parents, teachers, and communities in ways that positively impact learning by honoring indigenous heritages and local cultural practices.

Why America's sons are underachieving, and what we can do about it. Something is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than 20 years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home.

Counsels and Maxims is a classic work by noted German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. His work has influenced some of the modern world's greatest thinkers, including Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger. This piece was originally translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders.

"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person." ( The World According to Mister Rogers)

We’re asking the wrong question. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is no longer serving our students. This question perpetuates the myth that all students need to pick one job title—for life. The world has changed. The information age has created thousands of career possibilities. Artificial intelligence is causing major disruptions in almost every industry, and will bring about seismic shifts in the way we work. To prepare students for this new reality, we need a different approach.

Thousands of years ago, ancient philosophers asked some important questions: "Where do we come from?", "What is right and what is wrong?", "Am I real?", and "What is the point of existence?" These questions have gone on to spark passionate debates about our existence and how we understand the world around us. In this fun and engaging introduction to philosophy, listeners aged 11+ will be introduced to a variety of philosophical ideas through the teachings of Plato, Confucius, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

Matthew Kay and Jennifer Orr take on these questions and more in We're Gonna Keep On Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom. This book focuses on the unique and powerful role discussions about race can play in the elementary classroom. Drawing its title inspiration from the freedom song "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around," sung by hundreds of children marching against segregation in the Children's Crusade of 1963, We're Gonna Keep On Talking is written for teachers who are willing to match children's courage and brilliance.

In this short and powerful book, celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes a passionate case for the importance of the liberal arts at all levels of education. Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry in the United States and abroad.

Only he who understands life will be able to take his lessons from life itself. He will draw up no capricious schemes, for he knows that no other fundamental laws of life will prevail in the future than such as prevail in the present. Theosophy will therefore of necessity have respect for the existing state of things. Even, should it still find in what is existent, very much that might be improved, yet it will not fail to perceive in the present the germs of the future. But it knows, too, that for all things nascent there is a growth and a development.