"In this book, Diana Senechal confronts a culture that has come to depend on instant updates and communication at the expense of solitude. Schools today emphasize rapid group work and fragmented activity, not the thoughtful study of complex subjects. The Internet offers contact with others throughout the day and night; we lose the ability to be apart, even in our minds. Yet solitude plays an essential role in literature, education, democracy, relationships, and matters of conscience. Throughout its analyses and argument, the book calls not for drastic changes but for a subtle shift: an attitude that honors solitude without descending into dogma"--Provided by publisher.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness is the first major account integrating research on solitude, silence and loneliness from across academic disciplines and across the lifespan. The editors explore how being alone – in its different forms, positive and negative, as solitude, silence and loneliness – is learned and developed, and how it is experienced in childhood and youth, adulthood and old age. Philosophical, psychological, historical, cultural and religious issues are addressed by distinguished scholars from Europe, North and Latin America, and Asia.

Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.

Meet Jan. Jan is sometimes lonely. In this illustrated guide, he describes what loneliness feels like and how it affects him at home and school. He explains what he can do to feel less lonely, and how his teachers, family and friends can help him too. Child loneliness is an area of growing concern. This book is an ideal way to start a conversation about loneliness with anyone aged 7 and above and to help children understand the importance of healthy solitude, as well as socialising. It also includes a useful list of recommended reading, organisations and websites for further information and support.

Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference.

This book introduces the framework of aesthetic ecology to communication studies as well as the study of communication ethics underlining the importance of the interplay between our sensuous and interpretive engagements in/with the world.

An unapologetic critique of major flaws in the American education system. David Michael Slater’s We’re Doing It Wrong is a thought-provoking dissection of the issues plaguing American public schools. Each chapter identifies a major problem in the education system, exploring its roots and repercussions. A teacher himself, Slater opens up and gives readers an insider’s perspective on topics that have been at the center of ongoing debates as well as recent hot button issues, such as: Standardized testing Teacher evaluation practices Helicopter parents Class size Poverty’s effect on performance Anti-bullying programs Writing proficiency Curriculum goals Slater explains why our current approaches simply aren’t working—for students, for teachers, for the colleges that these students may eventually attend, and for society at-large. Unafraid to ruffle a few feathers, We’re Doing It Wrong highlights defects in policy and theory, calls out administration, and questions long-held beliefs. Every chapter concludes with a suggestion for improvement, offering light at the end of the tunnel. Administrators, teachers, and concerned parents will come away with a better understanding of the current state of education and ideas for moving toward progress—for themselves and for the students they support.