ABSTRACT
Schooling has always been a powerful source of social reproduction, along class, race, gender and ideological lines. This chapter argues it has also played a profound role in cultivating cynicism and anti-intellectualism in children from the 1980s onward. It has accomplished this by delimiting the types of knowledge available, undermining progressive and holistic goals in developing the full human being, infusing corporate thinking and commercialism into classrooms and instrumentalizing education in ways that teach youth that schools are merely a rite of passage on the road to a better job and economic future. It concludes by suggesting reforms that could restore hope to America’s youth while providing them with a civics education that can reduce cynicism and increase political participation.
