Dennis Carlson

Greg Dimitriadis

For all of its promise, public education in the twentieth century never lived up to its democratic potential. This book takes a serious look at the slow erosion of the fuller democratic meaning of a public education and a public life.

Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life

Promises to Keep

C. P. Gause

Essays on Leadership, Democracy, and Education

Keeping the Promise

This book takes a serious look at the erosion of democratic public life and public education, and offers directions for re-imagining, re-designing, and re-inventing the current system. Bridging the disciplines of film studies, postcolonial studies, curriculum theory, and politics, these essays suggest new possibilities for curriculum, and shed new light on what shape public education could take in coming decades.

To rise to the challenges of postmodern culture, Carlson argues, progressivism will need to leave the safe harbors of what is familiar and comfortable. A new progressivism can only be forged of a fundamental re-thinking and re-mythologizing of democratic education. Drawing upon cultural studies perspectives, Carlson interrogates philosophy through popular culture for mythologies that might guide such a progressivism. The author uses Platonic, Hegelian, Nietzschean, and Heideggerian mythologies to elaborate a progressive model that provides powerful ways of thinking democratic education and public life.

Toward a New Progressivism in American Education and Public Life

Leaving Safe Harbors

The essays in this volume explore the educational implications of unsettling shifts in contemporary culture associated with postmodernism. These shifts include the fragmentation of established power blocs, the emergence of a politics of identity, growing inequalities between the haves and the have-nots in a new global economy, and the rise in influence of popular culture in defining who we are. In the academy, postmodernism has been associated with the emergence of new theoretical perspectives that are unsettling the way we think about education. These shifts, the authors suggest, are deeply contradictory and may lead in divergent political directions?some of them quite dangerous. Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy examines these issues with regard to four broad domains of educational inquiry: state educational policy and curriculum reform, student identity formation, the curriculum as a text, and critical pedagogy. The book contributes to the dialogue on the forging of a new commonsense discourse on democratic educational renewal, attuned to the changing times in which we live.

Dennis Carlson

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