Hershock, Peter

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    Relating freely : the meaning of educating for equity and diversity.
    (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008) Hershock, Peter
    According to Buddhist teachings, although it is true that all things arise interdependently, the fruit of interdependence is not predetermined. Interdependence can be directed toward continued and ever more complicated trouble and suffering (samsara), or it can be directed toward meaningfully and sustainably resolving them (nirvana). Put somewhat differently, trouble and suffering are indices of errant interdependence or relationships gone awry; resolving our troubles and suffering means truing, or properly aligning, interdependence. In what follows, I want to make the case that the tragedies of global poverty are intimately related to the global spread and deepening of educational crisis. This will entail telling a complex story relating the structures and direction of twenty-first-century global interdependence; deepening poverty and inequity both within and among societies; and mounting evidence that serious educational shortfalls are emerging at rates and intensities that outstrip any conceivable pace of educational reform. Far from being a story of hopeless capitulation, however, it is a story centered on locating what David Harvey has termed "spaces of hope" within the very pattern of conditions that now serve as engines of inequity. As I hope to make evident, the same realities that globally are driving education into crisis are also opening opportunity spaces for education to serve as a driver for reorienting global interdependence toward a coordinative achievement of ever greater equity and diversity.