Little Platoons

Little Platoons PDF Author: Matt Feeney
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541645588
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This eye-opening book brilliantly explores the true roots of over-parenting, and makes a case for the vital importance of family life. Parents naturally worry about the future. They want to prepare their children to compete in an uncertain world. But often, argues political philosopher and father of three Matt Feeney, today's worried parents surrender their family's autonomy to gain a leg up in this competition. In the American ideal, family life is a sacred and private sphere, distinct from the outside world. But in our hypercompetitive times, Feeney shows, parents have become increasingly willing to let the inner life of the family be colonized by outside forces that promise better futures for their kids: prestigious preschools, "educational" technologies, youth sports leagues, a multitude of enrichment activities, and -- most of all -- college. A provocative, eye-opening book for any parent who suspects their kids' stuffed schedules are not serving their best interests, Little Platoons calls us to rediscover the distinctive, profound solidarity of family life.

Little Platoons

Little Platoons PDF Author: Matt Feeney
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541645588
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
This eye-opening book brilliantly explores the true roots of over-parenting, and makes a case for the vital importance of family life. Parents naturally worry about the future. They want to prepare their children to compete in an uncertain world. But often, argues political philosopher and father of three Matt Feeney, today's worried parents surrender their family's autonomy to gain a leg up in this competition. In the American ideal, family life is a sacred and private sphere, distinct from the outside world. But in our hypercompetitive times, Feeney shows, parents have become increasingly willing to let the inner life of the family be colonized by outside forces that promise better futures for their kids: prestigious preschools, "educational" technologies, youth sports leagues, a multitude of enrichment activities, and -- most of all -- college. A provocative, eye-opening book for any parent who suspects their kids' stuffed schedules are not serving their best interests, Little Platoons calls us to rediscover the distinctive, profound solidarity of family life.

Little Platoons

Little Platoons PDF Author: David Skelton
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785905139
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Brexit – a revolutionary moment in British politics. Voters in long-forgotten English towns made their disenchantment clear, overwhelmingly voting to 'take back control' from a remote and defective economic system. Despite this decisive message in 2016, the concerns of these forgotten towns have continued to be all but ignored. David Skelton grew up in Consett, a north-eastern town where the steel industry has deep roots. When the steelworks closed almost forty years ago it lost everything, a story echoed in towns across England. Skelton uses Consett's experience to discuss what has gone wrong and how we can put it right. He considers a broken social contract and the economic and identity liberalism which has neglected the needs of a great bulk of the population. Little Platoons calls for a revival of One Nation to recognise the needs of people in such towns. It argues that a brave Tory Party can shatter decades-old boundaries and redraw the political map by marrying social reform with private enterprise, enhancing community values and allowing long-ignored voters to genuinely take back control.

Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America

Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America PDF Author: Eric Wearne
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179360634X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons explores the idea of hybrid homeschools, where students attend a formal school setting for part of the week and are homeschooled the rest of the week. Eric Wearne observes that school choice in America typically comes in two forms: programs set up for disadvantaged students, and the more common form of choice that wealthy parents can exercise—paying private tuition or moving to a more desirable school district. While disadvantaged families in many places and wealthy families everywhere can exercise choice when it comes to schooling, a sizeable group typically gets left out of those options—the large number of families who are too wealthy to access state or local programs, but not wealthy enough to pay for private schooling or moving expenses. Wearne argues that this is a long-term weakness for school choice in America; the middle class is generally a well-off demographic, but is almost completely unserved when it comes to this large aspect of their children’s lives. However, one low-cost option has arisen to address this niche: hybrid home schools. Wearne cites existing research to argue for this model’s efficacy for the middle class as a strong example of a healthy civil society and examines how policy definitions are breaking down and evolving in education as we challenge the existing definitions of schooling.

Hybrid Homeschooling

Hybrid Homeschooling PDF Author: Michael Q. McShane
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1475857985
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
All across the country, in traditional public, public charter, and private schools, entrepreneurial educators are experimenting with the school day and school week. Hybrid Homeschools have students attend traditional classes in a brick-and-mortar school for some part of the week and homeschool for the rest of the week. Some do two days at home and three days at school, others the inverse, and still others split between four days at home or school and one day at the other. This book dives deep into hybrid homeschooling. It describes the history of hybrid homeschooling, the different types of hybrid homeschools operating around the country, and the policies that can both promote and thwart it. At the heart of the book are the stories of hybrid homeschoolers themselves. Based on numerous in-depth interviews, the book tells the story of hybrid homeschooling from both the family and educator perspective.

Dignity

Dignity PDF Author: Chris Arnade
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525534733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A profound book.... It will break your heart but also leave you with hope." —J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy "[A] deeply empathetic book." —The Economist With stark photo essays and unforgettable true stories, Chris Arnade cuts through "expert" pontification on inequality, addiction, and poverty to allow those who have been left behind to define themselves on their own terms. After abandoning his Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald's. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America's Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row's values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naïve. As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: "a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God." This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who've been left behind.

Outlaw Platoon

Outlaw Platoon PDF Author: Sean Parnell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062066412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A riveting story of American fighting men, Outlaw Platoon is Lieutenant Sean Parnell’s stunning personal account of the legendary U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division’s heroic stand in the mountains of Afghanistan. Acclaimed for its vivid, poignant, and honest recreation of sixteen brutal months of nearly continuous battle in the deadly Hindu Kesh, Outlaw Platoon is a Band of Brothers or We Were Soldiers Once and Young for the early 21st century—an action-packed, highly emotional true story of enormous sacrifice and bravery. A magnificent account of heroes, renegades, infidels, and brothers, it stands with Sebastian Junger’s War as one of the most important books to yet emerge from the heat, smoke, and fire of America’s War in Afghanistan.

Alienated America

Alienated America PDF Author: Timothy P. Carney
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006279714X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Now a Washington Post bestseller. Respected conservative journalist and commentator Timothy P. Carney continues the conversation begun with Hillbilly Elegy and the classic Bowling Alone in this hard-hitting analysis that identifies the true factor behind the decline of the American dream: it is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including marriage, church, and civic life. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump proclaimed, “the American dream is dead,” and this message resonated across the country. Why do so many people believe that the American dream is no longer within reach? Growing inequality, stubborn pockets of immobility, rising rates of deadly addiction, the increasing and troubling fact that where you start determines where you end up, heightening political strife—these are the disturbing realities threatening ordinary American lives today. The standard accounts pointed to economic problems among the working class, but the root was a cultural collapse: While the educated and wealthy elites still enjoy strong communities, most blue-collar Americans lack strong communities and institutions that bind them to their neighbors. And outside of the elites, the central American institution has been religion That is, it’s not the factory closings that have torn us apart; it’s the church closings. The dissolution of our most cherished institutions—nuclear families, places of worship, civic organizations—has not only divided us, but eroded our sense of worth, belief in opportunity, and connection to one another. In Abandoned America, Carney visits all corners of America, from the dim country bars of Southwestern Pennsylvania., to the bustling Mormon wards of Salt Lake City, and explains the most important data and research to demonstrate how the social connection is the great divide in America. He shows that Trump’s surprising victory was the most visible symptom of this deep-seated problem. In addition to his detailed exploration of how a range of societal changes have, in tandem, damaged us, Carney provides a framework that will lead us back out of a lonely, modern wilderness.

The Twins Platoon

The Twins Platoon PDF Author: Christy W. Sauro
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1616737530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A US Marine veteran recounts the experiences of his platoon in the Vietnam War following their enlistment at a Minnesota Twins baseball game. In the evening of June 28, 1967, 150 young Americans were sworn into the Marine Corps as part of the pre-game ceremonies of a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Before the end of the fourth inning these volunteers were being hustled on to buses, on their way to boot camp. It was a journey that would take them from a boyhood of baseball in the American heartland to manhood on the killing fields of Vietnam. Christy Sauro was one of the Twins Platoon, and in this book, he tells what it was like—from the pomp and ceremony of induction to the all-too-real initiation by fire that would shortly follow. In mere months, he and most of the Twins Platoon were on the ground in Vietnam and promptly faced with some of the toughest fighting of the war: the Siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, including the brutal Battle for Hue. From baseball to boot camp to brutal combat, his is a firsthand story of American life being lived at the limits—and changed forever. Praise for The Twins Platoon “[Sauro’s] jarring memoir takes you to some of the craziest fighting in the war. . . . The tales of Marines falling to the bullets and artillery of the enemy are truly heartbreaking.” —Military Book Club “Sauro’s modest study of 150 men from Minnesota who enlisted in 1967 adds respectably to the literature of the Vietnam War. . . . Based on extensive interviews with a cross section of the surviving veterans, the book makes rather grim reading. But then, it’s about young Americans in a rather grim war.” —Booklist “The Twins Platoon is a remarkable achievement, and Christy W. Sauro Jr. is to be commended for the single-mindedness and determination that enabled him to write it.” —Leatherneck Magazine

Age of Fracture

Age of Fracture PDF Author: Daniel T. Rodgers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.

First Platoon

First Platoon PDF Author: Annie Jacobsen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524746673
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
A powerful story of war in our time, of love of country, the experience of tragedy, and a platoon at the center of it all. This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly nineteen-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the U.S. Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world. First Platoon is an American saga that illuminates a transformation of society made possible by this new technology. Part war story, part legal drama, it is about identity in the age of identification. About humanity—physical bravery, trauma, PTSD, a yearning to do right and good—in the age of biometrics, which reduce people to iris scans, fingerprint scans, voice patterning, detection by odor, gait, and more. And about the power of point of view in a burgeoning surveillance state. Based on hundreds of formerly classified documents, FOIA requests, and exclusive interviews, First Platoon is an investigative exposé by a master chronicler of government secrets. First Platoon reveals a post–9/11 Pentagon whose identification machines have grown more capable than the humans who must make sense of them. A Pentagon so powerful it can cover up its own internal mistakes in pursuit of endless wars. And a people at its mercy, in its last moments before a fundamental change so complete it might be impossible to take back.