Ideas in Action – serie

Outstanding Academic Title of 2008Do you ever wonder why conservative pundits drop the word “faggot” or talk about killing and then Christianizing Muslims abroad?  Do you wonder why the right’s spokespeople seem so confrontational, rude, and over-the-top recently?  Does it seem strange that conservative books have such apocalyptic titles?  Do you marvel at why conservative writers trumpeted the “rebel” qualities of George W. Bush just a few years back? There is no doubt that the style of the political right today is tough, brash, and by many accounts, not very conservative sounding. After all, isn’t conservatism supposed to be about maintaining standards, upholding civility, and frowning upon rebellion? Historian Kevin Mattson explains the apparent contradictions of the party in this fresh examination of the postwar conservative mind. Examining a big cast of characters that includes William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Kevin Phillips, David Brooks, and others, Mattson shows how right-wing intellectuals have always, but in different ways, played to the populist and rowdy tendencies in America’s political culture. He boldly compares the conservative intellectual movement to the radical utopians among the New Left of the 1960s and he explains how conservatism has ingested central features of American culture, including a distrust of sophistication and intellectualism and a love of popular culture, sensation, shock, and celebrity.Both a work of history and political criticism, Rebels All! shows how the conservative mind made itself appealing, but also points to its endemic problems. Mattson’s conclusion outlines how a recast liberalism should respond to the conservative ascendancy that has marked our politics for the last thirty years.

This book provides practical information for teachers on developing their students' critical thinking skills. Ensuring that students leave school with good critical thinking skills has become a high priority over the last few years. This highly practical book provides effective strategies for developing these skills. The strategies can be adapted for all age ranges. This highly practical series contains a wide range of books of importance to teachers, trainees and NQTs. Each book is packed with ready-to-use activities to be used in the classroom. They are quick and easy to dip into: each technique is presented on the left-hand page, and the facing right-hand page shows a practical activity to put that technique into practice.

NLP is very effective in enabling young people to overcome fears, anxieties and limitations, which, in turn, helps them to achieve more in school, learn more effectively and, in life in general, become more fulfilled and wholesome individualsThis highly practical book provides strategies for teachers to use in the classroom to improve their own NLP skills as well as those of their students. Topics include: * Understanding that we only see what we believe is possible * Realising that we create our own experience * Using embedded commands to aid homework