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The Beautiful Tree
- A Personal Journey into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themsleves
- Narrated by: James Foster
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's summary
Everyone from Bono to the United Nations is looking for a miracle to bring schooling within reach of the poorest children on Earth. James Tooley found one hiding in plain sight. While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad's Old City. Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parent-funded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education.
Named after Mahatma Gandhi's phrase for the schools of pre-colonial India, The Beautiful Tree recounts Tooley's journey from the largest shanty town in Africa to the hinterlands of Gansu, China. It introduces listeners to the families and teachers who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and educating themselves.
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Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential best seller The End of Poverty - disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
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Sachs tries hard but the system is not there
- By Amazon Customer on 11-13-15
By: Nina Munk
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Class Warfare
- Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
- By: Steven Brill
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.
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Unions are Evil
- By Elton on 09-16-11
By: Steven Brill
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The Global Achievement Gap
- Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills our Children Need - and What We Can Do About it
- By: Tony Wagner
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Education expert Tony Wagner situates our school problems in the context of the global knowledge economy and analyzes the skills necessary for our young people to succeed.
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made obsolete by 'MostLikelyToSucceed'-still great
- By MichaelS on 04-01-16
By: Tony Wagner
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Confucius Never Said
- By: Helen Raleigh
- Narrated by: Helen Raleigh
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a four-generation family journey from repression and poverty in China to freedom and prosperity in the United States. Their lives overlap with many significant historical events taking....
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Wake up America
- By K and J on 12-14-19
By: Helen Raleigh
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The Nordic Theory of Everything
- In Search of a Better Life
- By: Anu Partanen
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving to America in 2008, Finnish journalist Anu Partanen quickly went from confident, successful professional to wary, self-doubting mess. She found that navigating the basics of everyday life - from buying a cell phone and filing taxes to education and childcare - was much more complicated and stressful than anything she encountered in her homeland. At first she attributed her crippling anxiety to the difficulty of adapting to a freewheeling new culture. But as she got to know Americans better, she discovered they shared her deep apprehension.
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A non-radical perspective on two societies
- By kwdayboise (Kim Day) on 06-20-17
By: Anu Partanen
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A Bigger Prize
- How We Can Do Better Than the Competition
- By: Margaret Heffernan
- Narrated by: Margaret Heffernan
- Length: 15 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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From the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the classrooms of Singapore and Finland, from tiny start-ups to global engineering firms and beloved American organizations like Ocean Spray, Eileen Fisher, Gore, and Boston Scientific, Heffernan discovers ways of living and working that foster creativity, spark innovation, reinforce our social fabric, and feel so much better than winning.
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Margaret Heffernan is brilliant!
- By Eric Willingham on 06-09-16
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What Teachers Make
- In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World
- By: Taylor Mali
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 2 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Former middle school teacher and teachers' advocate Taylor Mali struck a chord with his passionate response to a man at a dinner party who asked him what kind of salary teachers make - a poetic rant that has been seen and forwarded millions of times on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Based on the poem that inspired a movement, What Teachers Make is Mali's sharp, funny, reflective, critical call to arms about the joys of teaching and why teachers are so vital to America today.
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Loved it!!
- By Anonymous User on 02-16-22
By: Taylor Mali
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Age of Ambition
- Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
- By: Evan Osnos
- Narrated by: Evan Osnos, George Backman
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
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Come back when you have a warrant!
- By Neuron on 11-06-15
By: Evan Osnos
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The Working Poor
- Invisible in America
- By: David K. Shipler
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody who works hard should be poor in America, writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.
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Textbook Perfect Discussion of the Problem
- By Cynthia on 07-28-12
By: David K. Shipler
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The Bonjour Effect
- The Secret Codes of French Conversation Revealed
- By: Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow spent a decade traveling back and forth to Paris as well as living there. Yet one important lesson never seemed to sink in: how to communicate comfortably with the French, even when you speak their language. In The Bonjour Effect, Jean-Benoît and Julie chronicle the lessons they learned after they returned to France to live, for a year, with their twin daughters. They offer up all the lessons they learned and explain the most important aspect of all: the French don't communicate, they converse.
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Terrible French pronunciation
- By CA on 01-24-19
By: Julie Barlow, and others
What listeners say about The Beautiful Tree
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- jamie
- 01-21-19
The truth about education
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to know the truth about education. The story is engaging, enlightening and encouraging!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Abdussalam Abdullateef
- 01-26-16
One of my best book for 2015
A most read for any concern mind about education for poor, most especially in African. It shows how foreign aid on education is been channels to wrong side.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Meghann A. Ribbens
- 05-04-21
This is a must- listen!
If you have children, work with children, know any children or have ever heard of children, please listen to this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Houssem Hajlaoui
- 08-13-20
Eye opening!
The brilliant discovery of James Tooley about how low cost private schools in poor countries are solving the shortcomings of the failed public education system.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-06-15
Excellent Book
This book was just awesome. Although not an economics book, it's full of economic lessons. And it shows vividly that intentions don't always equal results and that government can often muddle things up when it tries to do good. Incentives matter. Always.
Before listening to this book I have little doubt that if I had ever considered the question (which I hadn't) I would have assumed that poor kids in the countries that Tooley studied cannot possibly attend private schools. I stand corrected.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Dr. Pablo Fetter
- 02-12-17
A rare gem: educational, entertaining and inspiring
The Beautiful Tree is the amazing real-life story of my friend James Tooley, who uncovered the education revolution taking place in emerging markets through low-cost private schools...
A rare gem that manages to be at the same time educational, entertaining and inspiring, this book should be required reading for education professionals!
James, BTW, put his money where his mouth is, and went on to start multiple low cost private schools in different emerging countries. This provides a practical validation to his research and puts James in the rare category of people that have succeeded both in academia and entrepreneurship.
Great work James!
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2 people found this helpful
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- LibertyReader
- 09-24-16
A Truly Inspiring Story
This is a great story that tells the story of a movement that is changing the world.
The triumph of private schools over government monopoly will be looked back on by historians as one of the seminal events in the 21st-century in the advancement of human freedom.
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- Douglas Morton
- 12-20-20
Revolutionary and Mindblowing
I cannot recommend this book enough. This is the kind of book that will change your entire worldview about how the world works. The data is in. The empirical evidence is here. We do not need government for education. The free market private sector can easily handle all education and schooling, even for the poor.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-26-21
Reassesing public schools in developing countries
A splendid book. The main theses:
- Lots of poor people are using private schools to educate their children.
- Lots of officials and development "experts" were unaware of this. Those who were aware dismissed the schools.
- Most parents believe private schools are better, even though they have to pay for them. The author finds that on most quality parameters, this is true. And then, the private schools cost a fraction of what public schools cost.
- In India, the current public school system had been established by brittish colonialists, supplanting a older system of private schools (which had been so effective that their style of teaching (peer-based) had been copied by english schools).
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