The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world's poorest people are educating themselves

by James Tooley

Overview

Upon its release several years ago, The Beautiful Tree was instantly embraced and praised by individuals and organizations across the globe. James Tooley's extraordinary ability to braid together personal experience, community action, individual courage, and family devotion, brought readers to the very heart of education. This book follows Tooley in his travels from the largest shanty town in Africa to the mountains of Gansu, China, and of the children, parents, teachers, and entrepreneurs who taught him that the poor are not waiting for educational handouts. They are building their own schools and learning to save themselves. Now in paperback with a new postscript, The Beautiful Tree is not another book lamenting what has gone wrong in some of the world's poorest communities. It is a book about what is going right, and powerfully demonstrates how the entrepreneurial spirit and the love of parents for their children can be found in every corner of the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781939709134
Publisher:	Cato Institute
Publication date:	08/20/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James Tooley is a professor of education policy at Newcastle University. There he is the director of the E. G. West Centre, which is dedicated to choice, competition, and entrepreneurship in education. Fresh out of college in the early 1980s, Tooley went to Zimbabwe to become a public school teacher. Now an award-winning scholar featured in PBS and BBC documentaries, he has written several books, and his work has been covered in Newsweek, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. He was a professor in leading universities in England, Canada, and South Africa, and also lived in Hyderabad, India, where he worked with the entrepreneurs and teachers who inspired this book.