'Training' the Body Politic: Essays on the School Reform Orthodoxy

This book attempts to expose and explode the myth of ‘failing’ schools—how elites have weaponized the specter of educational crisis in order to manipulate the public into blaming ‘broken’ schools for the increased economic instability our political duopoly has generated for decades. The author describes the Machiavellian ways in which elites have deflected attention from the plutocratic havoc of their own economic policies, including stoking tribalistic tensions between liberals and conservatives with culture war issues as a perfect camouflage for bipartisan assaults against the vast majority’s well-being in American society. In the tradition of Paulo Freire, author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this book attempts to show how elite narratives train the body politic to be subservient, passive, and docile entities (“an unthinking, manageable agglomeration” in Freire’s words) or worse, unwitting defenders of the status quo and inadvertent elite activists (like parasitized hosts sacrificing themselves to serve predatory interests). The school reform orthodoxy is just one example of the type of cognitive capture elites require in our society to inhibit outrage over a political system nurturing the needs of corporate wealth and power (the top 1 percent) at the expense of the rest of the population. How do elites spin a plutocratic system that’s hollowing out the middle class as one that’s democratic, freedom-preserving, and a ‘shining beacon of light’ to the rest of the world? How do they keep us from seeing that we exist in a system with “socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed? The book explores many of the Orwellian ways in which elites use doublespeak and twisted language to manipulate the public mind, including emphasizing ‘school accountability’, posing as virtuous accountabilists, as “a purposeful misdirection allowing powerful elites to escape accountability” for their own policies. How do elites keep us from seeing what the author calls the perverse exceptionalism of American society in comparison to other developed nations and advanced economies that fare far better on so many international indices, such as income inequality, social mobility, and child poverty? That is exactly the purpose behind the school reform orthodoxy—the cultural mantras about educational crisis. It’s to reinforce “the idea in our collective thinking that schools keep failing and if that weren’t the case the American Dream would be alive and well for everyone.” This book is not just for political activists, heterodox thinkers, and critics of neoliberalism. It’s also for critics of K-12 standardization: rebel educators, progressive teachers, anti-Taylorist principals, and disenchanted students. It attempts to provide a road map for those who want to “travel away from the top-down, standardized, one-size-fits-all, and test-centric mentalities that have dominated the educational landscape for decades.” Explore in these pages the Machiavellian, Orwellian, Carrollian, and Kafkaesque dimensions of what's been happening to America's schools and the society in which they are embedded in a book filled with over 100 artistic illustrations inspired by the likes of René Magritte, Shepard Fairey, and the punk rock band The Clash. Read more