Critical Social Thought
1 total work
The author uses an ethnographic study of teacher resistance to a state-sponsored "basic skills" reform movement in the United States to look at some fundamental issues of education and social justice. He shows how the cry of "back to basics", taken up by education pundits on both left and right in many parts of the English-speaking world, has become a smoke screen for less acceptable developments such as the whittling away of teacher autonomy, teaching to the test, and the assumption that children from disadvantaged areas should be taught low-level functional skills rather than the higher order thinking which might enable them to clmb the socio-economic ladder. This book raises important questions about the role of public education in a post-industrial society and the inter-relationship of class, gender and race in power relations in education. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of sociology of education.