Against School
Description
This book invites the reader to think education against, beyond and without the school and its paraphernalia. To think about 'education', rather than schooling, and what kind of education is relevant to and needed now in the complex, difficult and dangerous world we live in. That invitation means testing our limits, questioning and changing ourselves and thinking the practice of education differently. The book is not about tinkering, improving, reforming - it about clearing away the detritus of the school and using the space created to explore education as self-formation and commoning. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students of alternative education, schooling, educational policy and philosophy, and the sociology of education.
Reviews / Votes
"Book is not just a treatise against schools as they are, and 'education' as it is; this is a text about the world as it is, fatally wounded and dangerous, and the role of schools in perpetuating harm. There is much 'food for thought' in this that all (psychologists, educators and others) who try to work within the parameters of 'education' and 'schools' (notions may themselves be category errors) might heed." (Simon Gibbs, The Psychologist, thepsychologist.bps.org.uk, May 13, 2025)
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Persons
Stephen J. Ball is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, UK.
Jordi Collet-Sabé is Professor of Sociology of Education and former Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Vic - UCC, Spain.
Content
Chapter 1: The limit attitude: becoming foreign to ourselves.- Chapter 2: Giving up on hope and embracing despair: putting sociology in its place.- Chapter 3: Questioning the Sociology of Education: an archaeology of social relations.- Chapter 4: The Impossibility of the school: an epistemological critique.- Chapter 5: A sustainable life beyond school: a different episteme for education.- Chapter 6: Education and social infrastructures: facing up to extinction ethics.- Chapter 7: The 'problem' of the 'teacher': 'pedagogy' as the theatre of subject formation.- Chapter 8: (Without) Conclusions: a space in which to think differently.
