Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform (The Sociocultural, Political and Historical Studies in Education Series) (Paperback)

by David A. Gabbard (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This well-conceived, well-edited, and highly readable collection provides a panoramic view of the impacts on American education of an increasingly industrialized and globalized American economy.
—CHOICE

Gabbard's text presents as a very useful introductory text for use in initial teacher education, and as a handy reference volume for postgraduate students and practising teachers.
—Resource Review

Product Description

Advancing a three-fold political agenda, this volume:
* illuminates how the meanings assigned to a whole vocabulary of words and phrases frequently used to discuss the role and reform of U.S. public schools reflect an essentially economic view of the world;
* contends that education or educational reform conducted under an economized worldview will only intensify the effects of the colonial relations of political and economic domination that it breeds at home and abroad; and
* offers a set of alternative concepts and meanings for reformulating the role of U.S. public schools and for considering the implications of such a reformulation more generally for the underlying premises of all human relationships and activities.

Toward these ends, the authors, in Part I, critically examine many of the most commonly used terms within the rhetoric of educational reform since the early 1980s and before.

Part II links today's economized worldview to curricular and instructional issues. These essays are especially important for comprehending how the organization of school curriculum privileges those disciplines deemed most central to market expansion--math and science--and how the political centrality of the economic sphere influences the nature of the knowledge presented in specific content areas.

Given that language constrains as well as advances human thought, the twin tasks of de-economizing education and decolonizing society will require a vocabulary that transcends the familiar terminologies addressed in Parts I and II. The entries in Part III cultivate the beginnings of such a vocabulary as the authors elucidate innovative concepts which they view as central to the creation of truly alternative educational visions and practices.

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum; 1 edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805824340
• ISBN-13: 978-0805824346
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,809,846 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)