21st Century Scholar

In this essay I argue the economic inequities of today carve out a very large social condition that is orders of magnitude greater than can be conveyed by the term “poverty.” This condition derives from a massive theft of public wealth and abandonment of the principles of representative democracy. There is a silver lining: on [...]

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. –Jay-Z There is a common myth that spans the globe about America, which presents us as the ultimate privileged country offering [...]

In capitalist societies such as ours, there are hidden contextual rules in our understanding of poverty and its relationship to education. They hide the fact that the struggle for better schools and the elimination of poverty must include the struggle for a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism. This is likely to sound provocative to the [...]

Technology is changing the ways in which people communicate their thoughts and experience their surroundings. Augmented reality apps, for instance, add layers of information to places like museum exhibits and sporting events. Twitter connects individuals to trends. Social networking sites provide quick access to information about nearby places including parks and movie theaters. In their [...]

by Bill Tierney In 1841 Horace Mann wrote that “education has a power of ministering to our personal and material wants beyond all other agencies.  Every wise parent and community, desiring the prosperity of their children, will spare no pains in giving them a generous education.”   Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century Americans were in [...]

by Bill Tierney I have never visited Vietnam which is a large part of the reason that I jumped at the offer to give a half dozen lectures in Ho Chi Minh City at Vietnam National University and the Southeast Asian Ministry in December.  Although I have never been here, Vietnam looms large in my [...]

The last installment in our Travels in Turkey series follows. Turkey and Travel by Bill Tierney Although I have mostly resisted writing about anything other than issues related to higher education on this blog, enough people have asked me about traveling in Turkey that I thought I would give a thumbnail sketch of what to [...]

21st Century Scholar’s own Dr. William G. Tierney recently returned from a month in Turkey. He blogs about his travel experience in this fourth installment of the series, aptly entitled, Travels in Turkey. Turkey and Jobs by Bill Tierney A friend who lives here commented to me one day that “Turkey is a can-do country.  [...]

by Randy Clemens I recently completed a research project about undocumented immigrants. The project was a policy analysis of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. What did I find? After reading countless economic reports and news articles, I found that there is little neutral, trustworthy information available. For every report in which the [...]

21st Century Scholar’s primary contributor, Dr. William G. Tierney has spent the month of June in Turkey. He blogs about his travel experience in a new series, aptly entitled, Travels in Turkey. Globalization, Privatization and Turkey by Bill Tierney We are currently traveling in Turkey and I’ll have a lot to say when we return, [...]