Capitalism's Educational Catastrophe: And the Advancing Endgame Revolt!

by Ricardo D. Rosa, Joao J. Rosa

Overview

Neoliberal capitalism has paved the way to educational catastrophe. It has also opened paths for politically productive and transformative forms of localized resistance(s). This book examines the perilous catastrophe before us, and the possibility that we can reclaim our rights as citizens and redefine democracy as a process for global good rather than a euphemism for our collective enslavement to global markets, which annihilate our souls. The authors analyze the «crisis» in U.S. urban education through visceral narratives of social control while resisting the tendency to make the United States the epicenter of educational «reform» analysis. They explore neoliberal capitalism and processes of racialization as interdependent. The neoliberalization of education is having disproportionate negative implications for communities of color. More profoundly, neoliberal ideology is reworking processes of racialization and the way race is inscribed in discourse and bodies. The book is optimistic in sharing what might be done to inspire the mass withdrawal of consent not only to regressive regimes of high-stakes standardized testing, but to the entire edifice of neoliberal imperialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433124587
Publisher:	Peter Lang Publishing Inc.
Publication date:	03/31/2015
Series:	Counterpoints Series: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education
Pages:	181
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Ricardo D. Rosa is a scholar-activist who earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. He co-chairs the national organization Save Our Schools and the S.E. Massachusetts and R.I. Coalition to Save Our Schools.
Joao J. Rosa is the Executive Director of the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. He is an International Curriculum Advisor to the University of Cape Verde and a member of the National Commission on Languages. He is also the author of Discursos Linguísticos e realidades nas salas de aulas: Vencendo a luta pelo controle.
Ricardo and Joao are co-authors of Pedagogy in the Age of Media Control: Language Deception and Digital Democracy released in 2011 by Peter Lang.

Table of Contents

Contents: Charting the Neoliberal Nightmare and the Moral Outrage – Capital Movement and Global Displacement: Curricular Fatalities in the Age of Neoliberalism - the Case of Cape Verde – Performance Contracting and Supplemental Educational Services: Other Altars of Neoliberal Language Deception and Citizen Salvation – Education by Corporate Priorities, Youth Minds and Bodies under Arrest, and the Complexities of Resistance and Resignation – Raising Disquieting Questions in the Struggles Against Urban Violence – The Advancing Endgame Revolt! Dialogues with Activists and Community Organizers in the Trenches.

Editorial Reviews

«Capitalism's Educational Catastrophe and the Advancing Endgame Revolt! is a brilliant analysis and call to arms against those market driven forces that are turning schools into adjuncts of corporate power. This book is insightful, passionate, beautifully written, and essential reading for anyone who is concerned about schooling as a foundation for critical thought, agency, and democracy.» (Henry A. Giroux)
«This important work is an angry book, but objectively angry, documenting how an educational system ostensibly designed to benefit students has been bent to serve the priorities of the economic elite in North America and internationally. In showing that «it is possible to imagine other worlds», it does for education what Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything has done for climate change.»
(Gabor Maté M.D., Author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, Co-author, Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers, Scattered: how attention deficit disorder originates and what you an do about it) «Ricardo and Joao Rosa's impassioned and sweeping call to conscience exposes neoliberalism’s intentions and designs, revealing the pervasiveness and destructiveness of a racialized capitalism that accumulates through dispossession. This searing indictment is counterbalanced by their active call to mobilize historical memory in the service of social democratic alternatives as part of a re-envisioning of the kind of education and curriculum that can effectively stand up to this assault via the formation of progressive – indeed, radical – subjectivities.»
(Angela Valenzuela, author, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and professor, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin)

«Capitalism's Educational Catastrophe and the Advancing Endgame Revolt! is a brilliant analysis and call to arms against those market driven forces that are turning schools into adjuncts of corporate power. This book is insightful, passionate, beautifully written, and essential reading for anyone who is concerned about schooling as a foundation for critical thought, agency, and democracy.» (Henry A. Giroux)
«This important work is an angry book, but objectively angry, documenting how an educational system ostensibly designed to benefit students has been bent to serve the priorities of the economic elite in North America and internationally. In showing that «it is possible to imagine other worlds», it does for education what Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything has done for climate change.»
(Gabor Maté M.D., Author, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, Co-author, Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers, Scattered: how attention deficit disorder originates and what you an do about it) «Ricardo and Joao Rosa's impassioned and sweeping call to conscience exposes neoliberalism’s intentions and designs, revealing the pervasiveness and destructiveness of a racialized capitalism that accumulates through dispossession. This searing indictment is counterbalanced by their active call to mobilize historical memory in the service of social democratic alternatives as part of a re-envisioning of the kind of education and curriculum that can effectively stand up to this assault via the formation of progressive – indeed, radical – subjectivities.»
(Angela Valenzuela, author, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring and professor, College of Education, University of Texas at Austin)

From the Publisher