Vicious Circles in Education Reform

Assimilation, Americanization, and Fulfilling the Middle Class Ethic

By (author) Eric Shyman

Not available to order

Publication date:

04 October 2016

Length of book:

146 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475827231


Vicious Circles traces the history of development of public education and the near simultaneous advent of educational reform from its very beginning. Drawing on history, politics, law, sociology, and educational research, all aspects of public schooling are brought to light using a non-partisan analytical approach. Critically examining areas such as institutional racism, sexism, ableism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia, as well as the corporatization and privatization of public schooling, Shyman extracts the fundamental problems that have ever plagued, and continue to plague, successful education reform. Essentially, Shyman demonstrates that little progress in the area of education reform has ever been made. Rather, the same misinformed, repackaged efforts by a disconnected and insularly private political elite have continued to be applied, perpetuating a “vicious circle” of failed and misguided attempts at education reform.
Eric Shyman delivers a powerful critique of educational reform in the United States, through exposing debilitating political, economic, and cultural values that historically have perpetuated a brutal racializing cycle of social and material oppression. By so doing, stagnating contradictions of American democracy that hinder emancipatory imperatives of citizenship and civic life are unveiled in ways that propel us to rethink strategies for educational transformation in the future. In an era when democratic rights hang in the balance, this brilliantly complex and indispensable treatise urges us to recall the vital significance of public education in the forging of a genuinely democratic society—where critical thought, dialogue, and public dissent are essential to an ethics of freedom and a praxis of genuine democracy.