
Simulation, Spectacle, and the Ironies of Education Reform
Praeger Publishers Inc
Published on 25. April 1995
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-0-89789-444-9 (ISBN)
Description
As long as there is good money to be made from ignoring or cultivating the ignorance of working people, education for their children in the best sense is going to be a difficult goal. This book delineates in three case studies how our main myths of emancipation and upward mobility work as images of delusion. The frontier of space, the arena of sports, and the goal of employment, all essential elements in the discourse of reform, provide big windows into the absurd interior of the dreamscape of rhetorical hope that lay over the official landscape. The teacher has been replaced by the user-friendly, standardized trainer/coach/cooperative facilitator who works in the swamps of student minds so drained by consumerism that false consciousness cannot even grow. Reading the meaning of death in the ring, death in the rocket, murder in the workplace, Senese makes us notice the simulated, spectacular effects that distract from the important educational work that educators must do in this post-industrial world.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight
208 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-89789-444-9 (9780897894449)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
GUY SENESE is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations in the Department of Leadership and Educational Policy Studies at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans (Praeger, 1991) and coauthor, with Steven Tozer and Paul Violas, of School and Society: Educational Practice as Social Expression (1992).
RALPH PAGE is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
RALPH PAGE is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Content
Foreword by Henry A. Giroux Introduction: Education Reform and the Law of the Conservation of Suffering Away from Goodness: The Challenger Disaster and the Irony of Education Reform KO in Twelve: Boxing, Schooling, and Rackets as Theory and Metaphor Work Is for Saps: A New Hawthorne Effect and the Value of a Rising Tide of Mediocrity And a Pedagogy from the Surreal Conclusion: Symbols of Emancipation and the Cargo Cult of Education Reform Selected Bibliography Index