Schooled to Educate but not to Profit: Speculative Essays on the Political Economy of Education

Term of Award

Summer 2021

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Curriculum Studies (Ed.D.)

Document Type and Release Option

Dissertation (restricted to Georgia Southern)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

College of Education

Committee Chair

Ming Fang He

Committee Member 1

John Weaver

Committee Member 2

Robert Lake

Committee Member 3

William Schubert

Abstract

Transgressing the boundaries of traditional dissertation inquiries interwoven with my lived experiences, I compose this dissertation as a collection of speculative essays (Schubert, 1991) on the political economy of education (Gradstein, Justman, & Meier, 2005; Lipman, 2011; Saltman, 2018) with a particular focus on the impact of the idealization of profit and the action of power on modern public schooling in the U. S. Drawing upon a wide array of literature such as critical theory (e.g., Anyon, 2011; Giroux, 1988), cultural studies (e.g., Kellner & Share, 2009), and critical media literacy (e.g., Macedo & Steinberg, 2011), I present schooling and education as a political act and schools as sites of cultural reproduction. I explore the role ideology plays in shaping our complicated identities and creating meaning reproduced in our schools, that perpetuates the hierarchical order of society at the expense of public commons. I argue for a transformation of public schools that serve the public rather than subjugate to hegemony and commodity. Specifically, I use critical theory to examine the ways neoliberalism and cultural conservatism act as an agent of authority producing docile bodies and deform the nature/role of public schooling (Weaver, 2018). I explore what it means to be educated. I argue that schools should shatter the one-size-fits-all model, fulfill the mandate to educate, and become the places where teachers and students are valued as free people who are liberated to discover their own identities (Ayers, 2016; Lake, 2013) and compose their own lives as active participants in a contested and complicated world (He, 2021).

OCLC Number

1266868432

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS