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This concise, introductory book by internationally renowned scholar Jean Anyon centers on the ideas of Marx that have been used in education studies as a guide to theory, analysis, research, and practice.
Dialectics of Education is a rich collection of essays analyzing both the role of education in shaping ideology in the United States and the political implications of struggles for educational justice. This book seeks to recover and reframe the dialectical materialist tradition in critical education, studies and carries this tradition forward into theory and practice relevant for today. Building on the tradition of the groundbreaking book Schooling in Capitalist America that was first published in 1976, author Wayne Au presents a Marxist perspective on educational policies and pedagogy and the highlights the potential for struggle in both the political arena and the classroom. This book is an essential tool in the growing resistance against the privatization of education and for the struggle for educational rights for all students regardless of ethnicity or social status.
The Critical Turn in Education traces the historical emergence and development of critical theories in the field of education, from the introduction of Marxist and other radical social theories in the 1960s to the contemporary critical landscape. The book begins by tracing the first waves of critical scholarship in the field through a close, contextual study of the intellectual and political projects of several core figures including, Paulo Freire, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux. Later chapters offer a discussion of feminist critiques, the influx of postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas in education, and critical theories of race. While grounded in U.S. scholarship, The Critical Turn in Education contextualizes the development of critical ideas and political projects within a larger international history, and charts the ongoing theoretical debates that seek to explain the relationship between school and society. Today, much of the language of this critical turn has now become commonplace—words such as "hegemony," "ideology," and the term "critical" itself—but by providing a historical analysis, The Critical Turn in Education illuminates the complexity and nuance of these theoretical tools, which offer ways of understanding the intersections between individual identities and structural forces in an attempt to engage and overturn social injustice.
Higher education is increasingly unable to engage usefully with global emergencies, as its functions are repurposed for value. Discourses of entrepreneurship, impact and excellence, realised through competition and the market, mean that academics and students are increasingly alienated from themselves and their work. This book applies Marx’s concept of alienation to the realities of academic life in the Global North, in order to explore how the idea of public education is subsumed under the law of value. In a landscape of increased commodification of higher education, the book explores the relationship between alienation and crisis, before analysing how academic knowledge, work, identity and life are themselves alienated. Finally, it argues that through indignant struggle, another world is possible, grounded in alternative forms of organising life and producing socially-useful knowledge, ultimately requiring the abolition of academic labour. This pioneering work will be of interest and value to all those working in the higher education sector, as well as those concerned with the rise of neoliberalism and marketization within universities.
This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg
In today’s vernacular, Marx ‘outed’ capitalism well over a century ago; however, his explanation has been both ignored and misinterpreted by not only his detractors but also by many socialists and even a considerable number of Marxists as well. Today we are experiencing the full impact and suffering the repercussions of capitalism’s inherent need to grow and become, more than ever before, a fully internationalized and integrated system of socioeconomic control and domination—the global system that many commentators have suddenly remembered Marx and Engels (1848) presciently forecasted in the Communist Manifesto. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy was triumphantly proclaimed. The Cold War was over, and we were promised a lasting peace. As we entered the third millennium, the promise of peace was brutally dashed, and humanity now appears to have entered a state of permanent war. We have just witnessed the near total collapse of the global financial system and are continuing to experience, as we will for years to come, the collateral damage this crisis has caused. Problems we were facing before the current crisis will be exacerbated—escalating social and economic divisions, jobless growth, injustice, and oppression together with an environment in varying stages of degradation. Daily, on television news, we are bombarded by the schizoid media images of capitalism’s extremes: the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of some of the thousands suffering famine, or the millions living in the world’s slums, followed within a blink of the eye by the gleaming, yet vacuous, smile and sumptuously adorned figure of some extravagant, wealthy individual who is one of the select members of the global upper class. Are we becoming conditioned to accept such contrasts and regard them as normal and inevitable at a time when we have the potential to eliminate scarcity and eradicate human deprivation? The author argues that revolutionary critical education is needed to inform and form a social movement capable of challenging and then transforming capitalism. She also offers an accessible account of Marx’s dialectical critique and exposé of capitalism, clearly demonstrating the real enemy that should be the focus of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggles. This is an account that explains why our focus should not be on greedy, individual capitalists, Wall Street financial institutions, particular multinational corporations, national governments, or even their handmaiden institutions, such as, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. but instead the global network of capitalist socioecomomic relations and consequent habituated human practices in which we are all involved. These together with the historically specific form of capitalist wealth are the real enemy—the essence of capitalism—that must be abolished in order for humanity to have any hope of social and economic justice in the future.
This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive.
