This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key…

Examines "Ghost World," a Hollywood film about youth, friendship, alienation, and survival, critically investigating how popular representations of youth signal a particular crisis of the social through a discourse of privatization, which fails to locate youth and problems they face within the related geographies of the social and political. The…

Asserts that Paulo Freire's work has been appropriated in ways that denudes it of some of its important political insights. Argues that Freire's work must be read as a postcolonial text and that North Americans must engage in a radical form of border crossing to reconstruct Freire's work in the specificity of its historical and political…

Schools teach much more than the traditional curriculum. They also teach a "hidden curriculum"--those unstated norms, values, and beliefs promoting hierarchic and authoritarian social relations that are transmitted to students through the underlying educational structure. Discusses the effects of the "hidden curriculum" on the…

Changing historical conditions posit new problems, define different projects, and often demand fresh discourses. In some cases, theories fashioned in one historical moment seem hopelessly out of date, if not irrelevant, in another. Any critical theory both defines and is defined by the problems posed by the contexts it attempts to address. The…

Analyzes how traditional and liberal discourses treat the intersection of culture, power, and knowledge in fashioning a view of teaching and learning. Argues that both traditions fail as modes of critical pedagogy and that it is necessary to develop a critical discourse that embraces pedagogy as a form of cultural politics. (Author/GC)

Examines the shortcomings of the two major schools, behavioral and humanistic, that presently dominate the educational establishment's thinking about developing course objectives. Proposes a new pedagogical approach which allows educators to develop course objectives that illuminate the relationship between classroom methodology and content, and…

What is the task of educators at a time when mainstream American culture is increasingly characterized by a declining interest in and misgiving about national politics? How one answers this question will have a grave impact not only on higher education but on the future of democratic public life. There are no simple solutions says author Henry…

Suggests that educational researchers need to (1) expand schooling beyond the narrow interests of the marketplace; (2) view multiculturalism as central to democracy; (3) refuse to equate nationalism and monoculturalism; and (4) substitute community, solidarity, and public responsibility for emphasis on choice and individual competitiveness. (SLD)