ABSTRACT
Bringing together the sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, and post-foundational and historical approaches, this book asks what schooling does, and what are its limits and dangers. The focus is on how the systems of reason that govern schooling embody historically generated rules and standards about what is talked about, thought, and acted on; about the "nature" of children; about the practices and paradoxes of educational reform. These systems of reason are examined to consider issues of power, the political, and social exclusion. The transnational perspectives interrelate historical and ethnographic studies of the modern school to explore how curriculum is translated through social and cognitive psychologies that make up the subjects of schooling, and how educational sciences "act" to order and divide what is deemed possible to think and do. The central argument is that taken-for-granted notions of educational change and research paradoxically produce differences that simultaneously include and exclude.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |21 pages
Introduction
part I|62 pages
Schooling as Fabricating Human Kinds
chapter 4|16 pages
The Traveling of PISA
part II|60 pages
The Alchemy
chapter 6|16 pages
Scientific Americans
chapter 7|14 pages
From Scribbles to Details
part III|63 pages
The Double Gestures of Educational Reform
chapter 10|16 pages
New Mathematics
chapter 11|14 pages
The End of the World and a Promise of Happiness
chapter 12|16 pages
The Double Gestures of Schooling
chapter 13|15 pages
Untangling the Reasoning of China’s National Teacher Training Curriculum
part IV|50 pages
Research as an “Actor” and the Political