ABSTRACT
Th e editors of this outstanding volume have assembled a potent group of scholars and activists-both veterano/as and voices newly emergent on the scene-from a wide range of disciplines both inside and outside of the fi eld of education. Th ese contributors do not contest the mutually determining relationship between pedagogy and politics, and have dedicated themselves to deploying their pedagogical initiatives in the service of reclaiming the public sphere. Th ey are committed to transforming our social universe from an arena of strife and exploitation to counter-public spaces able to foster relations of mutuality, trust, and social and economic justice. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s (1988) book, Manufacturing Consent, is perhaps the most well-known treatise on how public pedagogy operates, and its particular focus was on the role and functioning of the media. It prophetically underlined the growing pedagogical role of the corporate media in manufacturing what Chomsky (1989) would later call “necessary illusions” that ideologically condition the public to accepting certain events and social relationships as unshakably true and absolutely essential. Th e Handbook of Public Pedagogy is written in the spirit of this storied volume. All of its contributors assert the vital need for defending the enduring values of public life and for transforming those dimensions of public life under threat of an encroaching barbarism, the most hideous instantiations of which revealed themselves in the criminal domestic and foreign policy abominations of the Bush administration.
