ABSTRACT

We intend this book as an antidote to the all-pervasive managerial and technical rational discourse on education. This discourse reduces education to performance objectives, league tables, standardized tests and teacher-proof tests. Calling for a socially engaged education, we present nine chapters, coauthored and published over the years in a variety of journals that explore education’s democratic potential to provide sites for critical engagement with social knowledge (McLaren, 2005). The approach adopted throughout the chapters is one that falls under the rubric of critical pedagogy, an approach which entails that we see education as being “always implicated in relations of power, social practices and the favoring of forms of knowledge that support a specific vision of past, present and future” (McLaren, 1994, pp. 168, 169).