Emergent paradigms in the physical sciences are combined with deconstructionist methods and Vygotsky's theory of speech and thought to formulate new mind-sets for society and education, which will promote nonlinear, nonpatriarchal, nonviolent, anti-authoritarian worldviews on which to build stronger individuals and societies. E. D. Hirsch and other establishment education reformers are shown to be dangerously noncritical and bound to old paradigms that advocate simple solutions to complex problems. Gannaway contends that the nature of contemporary American society is unique and must be...

Fay examines the unacknowledged political uses of language in modern culture that engender and effectuate power imbalances among speakers and listeners. She locates six strategies in which women are particularly targeted by politicized rhetoric and shows how they are used in a variety of language-informed social arenas. Using bell hooks' pedagogy of talking back, Eminent Rhetoric argues that women need not only to learn how to recognize victimizing rhetoric, but also to start to challenge it and its rhetors. Women must be shown how the everyday language of politicians, educators, and...

France presents a comprehensive critique of composition theory and pedagogy from a leftist perspective. He contests the notion that composition courses have no content and are only skills courses, devoid of intellectual suppositions and cultural premises. Writing instructors should therefore focus on teaching students how to retextualize contemporary cultural practices and become proficient in dissenting from as well as affirming the status quo. Each chapter extends the argument for a critical composition practice from theory into explicit, detailed narratives of composition techniques and...