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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 The teacher has been replaced by the user-friendly, standardized trainer/coach/cooperative facilitator who works in the swamps of student minds so drained by consumerism that false consciousness cannot even grow. Reading the meaning of death in the ring, death in the rocket, murder in the workplace, Senese makes us notice the simulated, spectacular effects that distract from the important educational work that educators must do in this post-industrial world.
List of contents
Foreword by Henry A. Giroux
Introduction: Education Reform and the Law of the Conservation of Suffering
Away from Goodness: The Challenger Disaster and the Irony of Education Reform
KO in Twelve: Boxing, Schooling, and Rackets as Theory and Metaphor
Work Is for Saps: A New Hawthorne Effect and the Value of a Rising Tide of Mediocrity
And a Pedagogy from the Surreal
Conclusion: Symbols of Emancipation and the Cargo Cult of Education Reform
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Guy B. Senese
