American Post-Conflict Educational Reform (PDF)

NOAH SOBE is Assistant Professor of Cultural& Educational Policy Studies and Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Education, Loyola University, USA.

"Can the United States repair a broken world? It's a very American question, of course, and education has played a big part in the answer. Americans have promoted their own ideas of schooling as a kind of universal panacea. Along the way, however, they sometimes worsened the same ills they had set out to cure. We were part of the problem, not just the solution, and this fine volume will help us sort out which was which." - Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of Education and History, New York University; Author of Innocents Abroad, American Teachers in the American Century

"Post-conflict education is often narrowly associated with government-sponsored interventions and we tend to forget about the missionaries, philanthropists, volunteers, military advisors, university professors, and, last but not least, development consultants that, either solicited or unsolicited, become actively involved in reconstruction efforts. What did these Americans think and do and how did they justify their presence? This book convenes the brightest minds to analyze U.S. post-conflict educational reform." - Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University; President of the Comparative and International Education Society

"This book is unusual in the degree of coherence in the papers included here, the uniformly high quality of the individual case studies, and the way they fit together into a fruitful organizational scheme. The impulse to share ideals with others is a very strong American impulse, and the case studies show how this process of ideological philanthropy played out in a wide variety of settings over the years. This is an interesting book that will stimulate fruitful conversations in the academy." - David F. Labaree, Professor of Education, Stanford University