"Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough" with Pawan Dhingra

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today’s youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. Middle-class parents are not satisfied with their children’s education, even when in well-resourced and highly-ranked schools. Instead, they also enroll them in after-school learning centers and academic competitions. Tutoring companies were already quickly expanding before Covid-19, and remote learning has accelerated this trend. The result is not only a threat to public education but also has implications for childhood and academic inequality. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews with teachers, tutors, principals, children, and parents (both Asian Americans and whites), Dhingra explains how the motivations for “hyper education” extend beyond that of so-called “tiger parents” committed to education and, in addition, involve parents’ moral concerns, including anti-blackness. Teachers resent this trend but their efforts to tamp down will not work. Meaningful changes will require re-envisioning what we want public education to be.

Register for this Zoom talk here: https://tufts.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkdeitpzMjEtISoXiXIvsG9hW8Ln2r1cx4

About the Speaker:
Pawan Dhingra is a sociologist and former curator and senior advisor of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition, Beyond Bollywood: Asian Indian Americans Shape the Nation. His most recent book is Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press 2020) and has been profiled on National Public Radio (NPR), Library Journal, and elsewhere, and which author Min Jin Lee has said “gets to the root of education obsessions.” He is the author of the award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012), which has been profiled in NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Colorlines Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He also authored the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007). Professor Dhingra co-authored the review text, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Polity Press, 2014). He has served as president of the board of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

Professor Dhingra joined Amherst College after serving as professor and chair of sociology and professor of American studies at Tufts University, as an associate professor of sociology at Oberlin College, and as an assistant professor of sociology at Bucknell University.

This event is hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Tufts, the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.

• 
  Sponsored

  WBUR Earth Week Events

  Tuesday, Apr 23, 2024 goes until 04/26

  WBUR CitySpace at The Lavine Broadcast Center
• 
  Sponsored

  Affordable Spanish Classes in Boston (in-person and online courses) | BASE

  Monday, May 06, 2024 goes until 05/25

  Boston Area Spanish Exchange (BASE)

Sesh by The Boston Calendar | Advertise Terms | Privacy Policy | About