This book brings together leading scholars of education to analyze different ways of looking at school. Steinberg, Kincheloe, and a group of contributors argue that the goals of education are reduced by a superficial public conversation. Simplistic political views and strategies for reform ignore the complexity of the educational process. The debate over the purpose of schooling is lost. This dynamic produces an impoverished debate about the role of schools in a democratic society, the nature of learning, what constitutes good teaching, diverse ways of evaluating educational excellence, and a...

This book offers an extensive introduction to the philosophical work of Catharine Macaulay, as expressed in her Letters on Education (1790). It traces the theme of gender and education comparing Macaulay s ideas to those of her contemporaries, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hester Chapone, and Stephanie de Genlis. In the process, it presents a clear picture of the eighteenth-century quarrel that debates the interassociation among gender, education, and intellectual attainment. This book intends to initiate an informed conversation with contemporary readers about Macaulay s work on education...

Relational -(e)pistemologies- redefines epistemology in a non-transcendent manner and reclaims the traditional epistemological concerns of standards and criteria for warranting arguments and determining truth and falsity. These concerns must be reclaimed in order to make them visible and accountable as well as pragmatically useful on socially constructed grounds not transcendental grounds. Thayer-Bacon s book offers analysis and critique as well as redescription. She presents a pragmatist social feminist view, a relational perspective of knowing embedded within a discussion of many...

For more than two thousand years Christian expansion and proselytizing was couched in terms of -defending the faith.- Until recently in the United States, much of that defense came in the form of reactions against the -liberal- influences channeled through big-corporate media such as popular music, Hollywood movies, and network and cable television. But the election of Ronald Reagan as a Hollywood President introduced Christian America to the tools of advertising and multimedia appeals to children and youth to win new believers to God's armies.

Christotainment examines how...

The publication of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve enraged readers with its contention that certain groups of children are genetically unable to learn because of their race and, therefore, unworthy of the educational attention and financial resources that flow from governments. In Measured Lies, the first thoughtful and reasoned reading of The Bell Curve, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg and Aaron Gresson have assembled a group of the most well-respected educators and social theorists writing today to provide responses to Herrnstein and Murray's racial and intellectual agenda: Henry...

This reader demands that we understand diversity and multiculturalism by identifying the ways in which curriculum has been written and taught, and by redefining the field with an equitable lens, freeing it from the dominant cultural curriculum. The book problematizes the issue of whiteness, for instance, as not being the opposite of blackness or person-of-colorness, but rather a meta-description for our dominant culture. Issues are also addressed that are usually left out of the discussion about diversity and multiculturalism: this reader includes essays on physical diversity, geographic...

This reader demands that we understand diversity and multiculturalism by identifying the ways in which curriculum has been written and taught, and by redefining the field with an equitable lens, freeing it from the dominant cultural curriculum. The book problematizes the issue of whiteness, for instance, as not being the opposite of blackness or -person-of-colorness-, but rather a meta-description for our dominant culture. Issues are also addressed that are usually left out of the discussion about diversity and multiculturalism: this reader includes essays on physical diversity, geographic...

America is a corporatized society defined by a culture of consumerism, and the youth market is one of the groups that corporations target most. By marketing directly to children, through television, movies, radio, video games, toys, books, and fast food, advertisers have produced a "kinderculture." In this eye-opening book, editor Shirley R. Steinberg reveals the profound impact that our purchasing-obsessed culture has on our children and argues that the experience of childhood has been reshaped into something that is prefabricated.

Analyzing the pervasive influence of these corporate...

Key Works in Critical Pedagogy: Joe L. Kincheloe comprises sixteen papers written within a twenty-year period in which Kincheloe inspired legions of educators with his incisive analyses of education. Kincheloe was a prolific thinker and writer who produced an enormous number of books and chapters and journal articles.In a career cut short by his untimely death, Kincheloe led the way with an approach to research and pedagogy that incorporated multiperspectival approaches that examined a wide range of topics including schooling, cultural studies, research bricolage, kinderculture,...