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 The teacher has been replaced by the...

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 The teacher has been replaced by the...