Title
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
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
Committee Member 3 Email
schubert@uic.edu
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
Catalog Permalink
https://galileo-georgiasouthern.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01GALI_GASOUTH/1r4bu70/alma9916469450502950
Recommended Citation
Schmidt, Gregory A., "Schooled to Educate but not to Profit: Speculative Essays on the Political Economy of Education" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2272.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/2272
Research Data and Supplementary Material
No