Rituals and Student Identity in Education: Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy (Education, Politics and Public Life)

A contemporary look at both the rituals fostered in our education system that reproduce inequalities between students and how we can change these techniques to promote equity in and outside the classroom. The current crisis in American schools has been more than fifty years in the making. The present assumption that "accountability" equals "testing" and that "education" equals "measurable objectives" has occurred in a brief lifetime. How has this happened? Quantz attempts to answer this question in this fascinating study. It is not a history of the movement, but an exploration of how the nonrational aspects of schooling, especially ritual(s), have been harnessed to construct a commonsense which serves the interests of transnational corporations, leaving those educators committed to democracy to develop a new pedagogy that rejects the technical solutions that present reforms demand Front Matter....Pages i-xii Introduction to the Nonrational in Education....Pages 1-20 School Ritual as Performance....Pages 21-44 From Ethnography to Ritual Critique....Pages 45-71 Nonrational Classroom Performance....Pages 73-89 On Seminars, Ritual, and Cowboys....Pages 91-113 The Puzzlemasters....Pages 115-146 Ritual Critique and the New Pedagogy....Pages 147-178 Back Matter....Pages 179-193