Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC's renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating "a better life for all" as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family…

This article undertakes a critique of the aims and objectives of "Thinking Skills", one of the most widely and internationally used curricula in the teaching of thinking, offered by the University of Cambridge International Examinations. By engaging in a critical discourse analysis of how political and class biases are (re-)produced in the forms…

Notwithstanding that Critical Race Theory (CRT) is currently in its second decade of existence, it is not and has never been something extraordinary--insofar as racism is something that has always been with us. Rather, CRT is a bona fide and avant-garde movement that leads to praxis--explicitly and courageously speaking to the injustices that…

This article argues that in Britain dominant educational discourses of "the ideal pupil" exclude minority ethnic pupils and prevent them from inhabiting a position of authentic "success". It suggests that "the successful pupil" is a desired yet refused subject position for many minority ethnic young people--even for…

Regardless of race, gender, class, physical- and cognitive-ableness, as well as sexual orientation, to be musical in North American and western European societies is to be queer--particularly for men (Fuller and Whitesell, 2002), and maybe specifically for men, since women barely register in discussions of musicians. In this article, the author…

"Falling Apart," a report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, indicates that America practices internal colonialism and continues to subject Blacks to "semislavery." The North American slavery system is traced from 1650, and it is shown how characteristics of that system have continued to the present. (PS)

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' findings are used to support the theory that the interplay between technology, economics, race relations, and power has always guided white treatment of blacks, and that blacks are being forced into ghetto reservations to suffer "conditional genocide" and be exterminated if they cause trouble. (PS)

Presents salient features of workshop discussion examining values, culture, and identity in early childhood education. Discusses issues related to identity, child rearing, language, and curriculum content for trainers and children. Considers the relationship between minority and majority cultures, language and power relations, and dominant and…

A number of propositions about power in America--taken from the work of Olson, Lowi, McConnell, Schattschneider, and Edelman--are presented and discussed. These propositions comprise an alternative theory to pluralism, which is termed "plural elitism." But neither pluralism nor plural elitism explains the emergence and effects of the…

Reviews an ethnographic analysis of Teach for America, a 1990 educational reform program that illustrates how underlying assumptions about "marginal" urban and rural students and their "deficient" environments solidify existing power structures, acculturate students to middle-class norms, generate resistance to teachers, and…