Problematizing the "reason" of schooling as historical and political, in this book leading international and interdisciplinary scholars challenge the common sense of schooling and the relation of society, education, and curriculum studies. Examining the limits of contemporary notions of power and schooling, the argument is that the principles that order school subjects, the curriculum, and teaching reforms are historical practices that govern what is thought, acted on, and talked about. Highlighting the dynamics of social exclusion, the normalizing of people through curriculum, and...

This book is a comparative history that explores the social, cultural, and political formation of the modern nation through the construction of public schooling. It asks how modern school systems arose in a variety of different republics and non-republics across four continents during the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The authors begin with the republican preoccupation with civic virtue - the need to overcome self-interest in order to take up the common interest - which requires a form of education that can produce individuals who are capable of...

Challenging conventional ways of thinking about school reforms and teacher education, this book analyses how the "knowledge systems" which organize how teachers' observe, supervise, and evaluate children produces norms that have the effect of excluding children who are poor and of color. Building on Struggling for the Soul (1998), his original study of the day-to-day life of new teachers in the Teach for America program, Popkewitz delves deeper into how the teaching and learning practices of urban and rural schools. Applying an ethnographic focus to how difference and divisions are...