Full Description
Tinkering with the current educational system from within has not provided a just and equitable education for all children. In this book, acclaimed education theorist Joanne Larson poses basic questions about the nature and purpose of schooling. Proposing that what is needed is a new purpose that is more consistent with contemporary knowledge production processes—one that moves beyond the either/or binary of preparing workers/citizens in a competitive global economy or a democracy, Larson argues that the only real solution is to start over in U.S. education—the purpose of schooling should be to facilitate human learning, meaning making, and knowledge production toward just and equitable education for all.
Radical Equality in Education offers a new ontological starting point and a new theoretical framing that would follow from it; articulates theoretical, curricular, pedagogical, and assessment principles that frame a real plan for fundamental change in American education, and presents examples of what these ideas might look like in schools and communities.
Contents
Foreword, Kris Gutierrez
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Fed Up with Tinkering
What We Already Know: Schools are Outdated
Children and Youth are Not Being Well-served: Standardization and Obsessive Testing Causes Damage
Traditional Purposes Reflect an Unproductive Binary of Worker/Citizen
Why Now?
Why Start Over?
Chapter Two: From an Equitable Starting Place
Equality of Intelligence
Equipotentiality
Produsage
Mass collaboration
Spatial Justice
Lunch Is Gross
Freedom Market Project
Guiding principles
Chapter Three: Toward Different Ends
Purposes of Schooling
The Common Good
Operationalizing the Neoliberal Common Good
Normative purposes
A New Purpose
Chapter Four: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
Curriculum
"Instruction" and Pedagogy
Assessment
Guiding Principles
Chapter Five: Imagine We Climb the Mountain
Imagining the New
Knowledge Producing Schools
What Makes the Argument Plausible?
What We Need to Do Now
References
