Full Description
This book draws upon original research at Beaumont Academy, a celebrated flagship secondary school, to explore how new forms of neoliberal governmentality are reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. Considering the complex narratives of students, teachers and parents, the book examines the stories underlying Beaumont's glossy veneer of success, highlighting the persistent structural inequalities concealed beneath its rhetoric of aspirational citizenship. Chapters demonstrate how hopes and dreams are harnessed and mobilized to exact social control, and how marketized education systems reshape inequality, foreclosing spaces of democratic participation through the imposition of authoritarian discipline and self-belief.
Contents
1. The Advent of Academiesand Research Frameworks 2. Disciplining Beaumont Academy: Keeping the 'Well Oiled Machine' Running Efficiently 3. Cohering Contradictions: Heroic Individualism and the Cultivation of Belief in Beaumont's 'Good Empire' 4. Inequitable Foundations: Ideal (White) Middle-Class Students and Unruly 'Urban Children' Meet the Demands of the Education Market 5. Student Navigations and Negotiations: Aspiration, Loss, Endurance and Fantasy 6. Urban Chaos and the Imagined Other: Remaking Middle-Class Hegemony 7. Conclusion: Remaking Inequalities in the Neoliberal Institution
