Unschooling Critical Pedagogy, Unfixing Schools

John E. Petrovic is Professor and Program Coordinator for the Social and Cultural Studies Concentration in the College of Education at The University of Alabama. He earned his PhD from University of Colorado in foundations of education, specializing in philosophy and policy studies. He has been President of the Southeast Philosophy of Education Society and Secretary of the American Educational Studies Association. He has served on several editorial boards including those of the American Educational Research Journal, International Multilingual Research Journal, and Thresholds in Education. He is Executive Editor of Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education. He is author of A Post-liberal Approach to Language Policy (2015) and his recent edited volumes include Indigenous Philosophies of Education Around the World (co-edited with Roxanne Mitchell, 2018) and Citizenship Education Around the World: Local Contexts and Global Possibilities (co-edited with Aaron Kuntz, 2014). Petrovic teaches courses on multicultural education, language policy, and philosophy of education.

“Testing, grading, tracking: the machinery of ‘fixing’ education. But what of the alternative? When critique becomes dogma, and that which once melted into air has regained its solidity, this book is just the solvent we need. Timely and incisive, it dares to challenge the shortcomings of the many on the educational left whose answers to the testing problems of our day have become ossified or neutralised by attrition and compromise. An alertness to the working of neoliberal ideology informs John E. Petrovic’s perspective, cast uncompromisingly through the lens of Marxist analysis. It is to his credit that Petrovic revives the spirit of much maligned writers such as Althusser and Illich whose idiosyncratic emergence at a particular historical moment should not be seen to restrict their application now to the fixity of schooling for neoliberalism, and in so doing to propose unschooling (in school!) beyond the fetishisation of grades in their commodity form.”—Simon Boxley, University of Winchester, United Kingdom

• Acknowledgments – Intro duction: Unschooling Critical Pedagogy and Unfixing Education –Fixing Education – Unfixing Education with Critical Pedagogy – Critical Pedagogy within an Ideological State Apparatus – Unschooling Against the Ideological State Apparatus – Unschooling in and out of Schools – Authenticity, Identity Politics, and Critical Pedagogy – References – Index.