An urgent wake-up call that the current education systems in the U.S., and worldwide, have long overstayed their welcome, and a roadmap to a sustainable academic future.

New Era – New Urgency: The Case for Repurposing Education explores the unprecedented realities and challenges associated with entering a new era, such as catastrophic climate changes, advanced artificial intelligence, massive demographic shifts, and worldwide digital disinformation campaigns. This era calls for a new urgency in thinking about how we will educate present and future generations of young people.

This book is divided into four parts;

• Part I describes the profound social, technological, and demographic changes that have occurred over four hundred years since the first English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia.
• Part II describes four shadows that have served to corrupt these purposes of education: extreme wealth inequality, nativism, white supremacy, and anti-intellectualism.
• Part III explores the illusions of educational reform that have over-promised college and career success, created an idolatry of math test scores, conflated memorization of facts with conceptual understanding, and confused multiple layers of policy agendas with progress.
• Part IV depicts F. Joseph Merlino and Deborah Pomeroy’s twelve years of experience in Egypt, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkey, and the U.S. in helping to craft new purposes of education for model schools in their countries that reflect their aspirations for a new generation.