Why we need to stop wasting public funds on education Despite being immensely popular—and immensely lucrative—education is grossly overrated. Now with a new afterword by Bryan Caplan, this explosive book argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to signal the qualities of a good employee. Learn why students hunt for easy As only to forget most of what they learn after the final exam, why decades of growing access to education have not resulted in better jobs for average workers, how employers reward workers for costly schooling they rarely ever use, and why cutting education spending is the best remedy. Romantic notions about education being "good for the soul" must yield to careful research and common sense— The Case against Education points the way.

Introduction : class, race, and gender in educational politics--Textual authority, culture, and the politics of literacy--Postmodernism and the discorse of educational criticism--Cultural politics, reading formations, and the role of teachers as public intellectuals--Border pedagogy in the age of postmodernism--The punishment of disciplines : cultural studies and the transformation of legitimate knowledge--Working-class displacements and postmodern representations--Conclusion : postmodernism as politics--Beyond difference as technological utopianism and cultural separatism.

A dazzling intellectual treatise on the promise of American culture, education, and democracy by dynamic Renaissance man Leon Botstein, called "an intellectual Bo Jackson" by "The New York Times". Claiming America is stronger than ever, Botstein takes on the cultural pessimists he believes are harming our youth and damaging our democracy.

Examines the public school systems in Chicago and San Francisco, and argues that equal opportunity is no longer regarded as a right

Schools have lost their unquestioned claim to educational legitimacy. But is it schools as such which need to be changed or the underlying attitude which makes of learning a specialized activity distinct from the rest of life? Here Illich trenchantly argues that the search for radical alternatives to teh school system will be of little avail unless it is accompanied by wider political objectives which redefine our entire relationship to knowledge.

Illustrating the effect of class relationships upon the institutionalizing of elaborate codes in the school, the papers in this volume each develop from the previous one and demonstrate the evolution of the concepts discussed.

This book, the fifth in the series developing Bernstein's code theory, presents a lucid account of the most recent developments of this code theory and, importantly, shows the close relation between this development and the empirical research to which the theory has given rise. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity addresses the central issue of Bernstein's research project: are there any general principles underlying the transformation of knowledge into pedagogic communication? In Bernstein's view, we have studied only pedagogic messages and their institutional and ideological base. We have not studied the nature of the relay which makes messages possible. The discussion of this research forms part II of this book, where Bernstein makes explicit the methodology of the research and, in particular, the crucial significance of languages of description.

This book, the fifth in the series developing Bernstein's code theory, presents a lucid account of the most recent developments of this code theory and, importantly, shows the close relation between this development and the empirical research to which the theory has given rise. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity addresses the central issue of Bernstein's research project: are there any general principles underlying the transformation of knowledge into pedagogic communication? In Bernstein's view, we have studied only pedagogic messages and their institutional and ideological base. We have not studied the nature of the relay which makes messages possible. The discussion of this research forms part II of this book, where Bernstein makes explicit the methodology of the research and, in particular, the crucial significance of languages of description.

«Basil Bernstein was both the most interesting and important British sociologist of recent times, internationally better known for longer than any other [...]. His ideas offer the most developed grammar for understanding the shape and character of our current educational practice. At its various points, his emerging corpus has offered a combination of connectedness and openness. He was a constant reviser of his ideas, arguing always that this was necessitated by the relationship between the empirical and the theoretical. This volume is replete with cameos of various aspects of his corpus that the individual researchers represented have regarded as particularly important both for themselves and their analyses. They celebrate a joint dedication to 'developing a more systematic and general language of description'. [...]. This book also contains a paper by Bernstein and a video conference.» (Brian Davies, From the Introduction)

This book critically examines the socio-cultural role of achievement within education, arguing that the increasingly global demand for measurable standards of academic achievement is an expression of political ideology and the aggressive competitive reality of a neo-capitalist schooling system, resulting in many students feeling socially worthless.