David J. Blacker – författare

Through a philosophical lens, this book explores the powerful educational capabilities of classic psychedelics.Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Education categoryIn both clinical and informal settings, psychedelics users often report they have undergone something profound and even life-altering. Yet there persists a confounding inability to articulate just what has been imparted. Informed by multidisciplinary emerging research, this book provides an account of the specifically educational aspects of psychedelics and how they can render us ready to learn. Drawing from indigenous peoples worldwide who typically revere these substances as "plant teachers" and from canonical thinkers in the western tradition such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger, the author proposes an original set of categories through which to understand the educational capabilities of "entheogens" (psychedelics with visionary qualities). It emerges that entheogens' real power lies not in destabilizing and decentering-"turning on and dropping out"-but as powerful aids in restoring and reenchanting our shared worlds.

Through a philosophical lens, this book explores the powerful educational capabilities of classic psychedelics.Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Education categoryIn both clinical and informal settings, psychedelics users often report they have undergone something profound and even life-altering. Yet there persists a confounding inability to articulate just what has been imparted. Informed by multidisciplinary emerging research, this book provides an account of the specifically educational aspects of psychedelics and how they can render us ready to learn. Drawing from indigenous peoples worldwide who typically revere these substances as "plant teachers" and from canonical thinkers in the western tradition such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger, the author proposes an original set of categories through which to understand the educational capabilities of "entheogens" (psychedelics with visionary qualities). It emerges that entheogens' real power lies not in destabilizing and decentering-"turning on and dropping out"-but as powerful aids in restoring and reenchanting our shared worlds.

The current neoliberal mutation of capitalism has evolved beyond the days when the wholesale exploitation of labor underwrote the world system's expansion. While "normal" business profits plummet and theft-by-finance rises, capitalism now shifts into a mode of elimination that targets most of us-along with our environment-as waste products awaiting managed disposal. The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grace, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education. "Education reform" is powerless against eliminationism and is at best a mirage that diverts oppositional energies. The very idea of education activism becomes a comforting fiction. Educational institutions are strapped into the eliminationist project-the neoliberal endgame-in a way that admits no escape, even despite the heroic gestures of a few. The school systems that capitalism has built and directed over the last two centuries are fated to go down with the ship.It is rational therefore for educators to cultivate a certain pessimism. Should we despair? Why, yes, we should-but cheerfully, as confronting elimination, mortality, is after all our common fate. There is nothing and everything to do in order to prepare.

In 1960, Paul Goodman argued that the Fordist system that treated people as mere cogs in a machine had created a profound unhappiness in young people and in American society as a whole. More than half a century later, professor David Blacker recognizes that decades of neoliberalism have pushed young people beyond unhappiness and into a collective identity crisis. Overall, Americans no longer feel needed to do jobs that had previously anchored them in society and are becoming disconnected and purposeless. The proliferation of new identities, based not on work but on consumption, is symptomatic of neoliberalism and its hyper-commodification and deregulation of everyday life.

Argues that the complexity of our pluralistic social world demands an enriched conception of democratic education.Is a democratic education promoting the ideals of human equality and individual liberty still tenable in a postmodern world of increasingly diverse and competing interests? Drawing on contemporary political theorists, including Michael Walzer and John Rawls, and also on philosophers such as Descartes and Hume, David J. Blacker addresses this question, outlining the dispute between orthodoxy and proceduralism, and proposing a new approach of liberal contextualism to resolve the impasse and enrich our conception of democratic education. He discusses a wide range of controversies surrounding students' constitutional rights, religion in public schools, special education, civic and moral education, sex education, students' citizenship status, and educational accountability, and argues for change at both the institutional and personal levels. He concludes that democratic education must be allowed to connect with how individuals understand the ultimate aims and purposes of their lives.