To rise to the challenges of postmodern culture, Carlson argues, progressivism will need to leave the safe harbors of what is familiar and comfortable. A new progressivism can only be forged of a fundamental re-thinking and re-mythologizing of democratic education. Drawing upon cultural studies perspectives, Carlson interrogates philosophy through popular culture for mythologies that might guide such a progressivism. The author uses Platonic, Hegelian, Nietzschean, and Heideggerian mythologies to elaborate a progressive model that provides powerful ways of thinking democratic education and...

Public education at the beginning of the 20th century held the promise to produce a vigorous democratic public life. Quickly, though, powerful elites took control of public education to implement a factory model of schooling that has failed public life. we are at a turning point in the history of democratic public life and public education, and that we must re-imagine, re-design and re-invent the current system. Promises to Keep looks to the confluence of schooling, cultural life and the public sphere to envision what education can and should be in the future.

The essays in this volume explore the educational implications of unsettling shifts in contemporary culture associated with postmodernism. These shifts include the fragmentation of established power blocs, the emergence of a politics of identity, growing inequalities between the haves and the have-nots in a new global economy, and the rise in influence of popular culture in defining who we are. In the academy, postmodernism has been associated with the emergence of new theoretical perspectives that are unsettling the way we think about education. These shifts, the authors suggest, are deeply...

The Education of Eros is the first and only comprehensive history of sexuality education and the "problem" of adolescent sexuality from the mid-20th century to the beginning of the 21st. It explores how professional health educators, policy makers, and social and religious conservatives differed in their approaches, and battled over what gets taught about sexuality in schools, but all shared a common understanding of the adolescent body and adolescent desire as a problem that required a regulatory and disciplinary education. It also looks the rise of new social movements in civil...

Advocates of the 'back-to-basics' movement argue that a basic skills programme ensures that students are educated to a minimum level of literacy required to enter the labour force. Critics charge that these efforts only increase school bureaucracy and undermine teachers' autonomy in the classroom.

First published in 1992, this book moves beyond the rhetoric surrounding the basic skills debate by providing a thorough yet critical examination of urban education, urban school reform, and teachers' work culture. Beginning with a sparkling theoretical discussion of the problems and...