Simulation, Spectacle, and the Ironies of Education Reform

GUY SENESE is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations in the Department of Leadership and Educational Policy Studies at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans (Praeger, 1991) and coauthor, with Steven Tozer and Paul Violas, of School and Society: Educational Practice as Social Expression (1992).RALPH PAGE is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As long as there is good money to be made from ignoring or cultivating the ignorance of working people, education for their children in the best sense is going to be a difficult goal. This book delineates in three case studies how our main myths of emancipation and upward mobility work as images of delusion. The frontier of space, the arena of sports, and the goal of employment, all essential elements in the discourse of reform, provide big windows into the absurd interior of the dreamscape of rhetorical hope that lay over the official landscape. The teacher has been replaced by the user-friendly, standardized trainer/coach/cooperative facilitator who works in the swamps of student minds so drained by consumerism that false consciousness cannot even grow. Reading the meaning of death in the ring, death in the rocket, murder in the workplace, Senese makes us notice the simulated, spectacular effects that distract from the important educational work that educators must do in this post-industrial world.

Foreword by Henry A. GirouxIntroduction: Education Reform and the Law of the Conservation of SufferingAway from Goodness: The Challenger Disaster and the Irony of Education ReformKO in Twelve: Boxing, Schooling, and Rackets as Theory and MetaphorWork Is for Saps: A New Hawthorne Effect and the Value of a Rising Tide of MediocrityAnd a Pedagogy from the SurrealConclusion: Symbols of Emancipation and the Cargo Cult of Education ReformSelected BibliographyIndex