Higher education is in a time of crisis--diminishing funds, rising costs, lack of student preparation for college work, low morale among students and faculty, strained relations between faculty and administration, and confusion about curriculum and educational goals. Tierney believes that the problems are moral. He suggests that by following principles used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, institutions of higher learning can model themselves on communities of brotherly love and service to humanity. Tierney presents several case studies of postsecondary institutions and shows how academic...

By combining history with sociology, Rothstein presents a new way of looking at state-supported schools. He describes the pauper schools of the early 1800s and shows how they became the foundation for the common schools that followed. Compulsory education sought to alleviate urban crime while assimilating the immigrants who flocked to our shores in each generation. In the late 19th century, the militaristic schools became more bureaucratic and set in their ways in spite of the new thinking in education represented by John Dewey. Rothstein shows how Dewey was taught in college but that...

Coming out is the process of acknowledging same-sex attractions to oneself and to others. It is both a personal and a public process. For many gay and bisexual students, college marks a pivotal point where for the first time they feel free to explore their same-sex attractions. This book is about the struggles students face in coming out. The focus is twofold: the experiences individuals face in coming to terms with their sexual identity and the process of developing a group identity. The development of a group identity involves a degree of political investment. For some students, becoming...

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 The teacher has been replaced by the...

The poststructuralist critique of subject-centered reason is investigated, both historically and theoretically, against the background of the modernity/postmodernity and information society debates. Peters criticizes neoliberal constructions of the subject in education that rest heavily on the assumption of economic man. He searches for viable contemporary political forms by investigating the role of intellectuals and education in postmodern culture; the neoliberal doctrine of the self-limiting state; and its construction of market subjects such as education and the politics of space,...

This book addresses an area that is theoretically undeveloped in educational studies--the constitution of the human subject. The author uses psychoanalysis to explore this gap in critical studies of education. Educational progressivism overestimates the power of rationality and represses any understanding of unconscious mental processes. What is needed is the development of a psychodynamic 'social psychology of classes.' According to the author, we need to investigate the differential relations between institutional and self-formative processes.

This book examines the need for the development of an expanded theoretical foundation of counselor education which will serve to better prepare school counselors for effectively meeting student counseling needs in the 21st century. This process includes a rethinking of meanings and outcomes associated with counselor education, the counseling process, the role of the school counselor, and the political implications embedded in educational counseling. The expanded theoretical framework includes questioning the applicability and relevance-to-practice of current counselor education, a critical...

This critical ethnography of school libraries contributes to the study of the politics of literacy at the elementary school level as well as provides an interesting case study of border crossing. The book interrogates two accounts of social reproduction and proposes a third. Students at working-poor Chavez Elementary resisted attempts to get them hooked on reading fiction, but while many were socialized to the labor of a piecework economy, many also found ways to use texts as they chose. At professional-managerial Crest Hills, students managed their discourse practices in ways that...

Adults have been and remain marginalized in academic institutions because of the persistence of a deeply rooted culture bias. This work analyzes the current state of the adult student experience in higher education, exploring the organizational, instructional, and interpersonal barriers that adults face in reaching their educational goals. Using applied critical and postmodern theory, the author explores the hypothesis that adults are at-risk in higher education settings because of such bias. The book includes an extensive review and critique of the literature and of contemporary adult...

This book begins with an historical overview of the development of the concept of multiculturalism as it has been implemented in the American university. The book defines American multiculturalism through a focus on the ways theories and practices of historical, non-critical, multiculturalism have been used in the discourse of academic English departments. The author maps the problematic relationship between radical theory and institutional practices, which impedes the development of a critical multiculturalism that engages both literary theory and pedagogy. This critical multicultural...