The Alienated Student

In their journeys to engaged citizenship, civic education is a right for all students, helping them to become active and informed. However, for some students, there are barriers to engagement. It is these barriers that are dealt with in this book. Civic education is a key component of the school curriculum irrespective of country and political system. Ensuring that young people understand the political and social contexts of their country, and indeed their planet, is a key requirement in a rapidly changing and unpredictable world. Providing access to civic learning, therefore, is a priority for schools and the societies in which they are embedded. Yet, for some students, barriers exist which prevent a deep understanding of the requirements for full participation and engagement. These students are neglected not only in schools but in research as well. This book seeks to fill that gap by shining a light on the multiple disadvantages that many students suffer in seeking to exercise their rights as active and informed citizens. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Educational Psychology.

Innovative readings and blog posts show how sociology can help us understand everyday life.

Higher education is increasingly unable to engage usefully with global emergencies, as its functions are repurposed for value. Discourses of entrepreneurship, impact and excellence, realised through competition and the market, mean that academics and students are increasingly alienated from themselves and their work. This book applies Marx’s concept of alienation to the realities of academic life in the Global North, in order to explore how the idea of public education is subsumed under the law of value. In a landscape of increased commodification of higher education, the book explores the relationship between alienation and crisis, before analysing how academic knowledge, work, identity and life are themselves alienated. Finally, it argues that through indignant struggle, another world is possible, grounded in alternative forms of organising life and producing socially-useful knowledge, ultimately requiring the abolition of academic labour. This pioneering work will be of interest and value to all those working in the higher education sector, as well as those concerned with the rise of neoliberalism and marketization within universities.

225 references to books, journals, and unpublished Ph. D. dissertations during the period 1959-1968. Arranged alphabetically by authors under broad topics. Author index.

The enormous changes in twentieth-century Chinese higher education up to the Sino-Japanese War are detailed in this pioneering work. Yeh examines the impact of instruction in English and of the introduction of science and engineering into the curriculum. Such innovations spurred the movement of higher education away from the gentry academies focused on classical studies and propelled it toward modern middle-class colleges with diverse programs. Yeh provides a typology of Chinese institutions of higher learning in the Republican period and detailed studies of representative universities. She also describes student life and prominent academic personalities in various seats of higher learning. Social changes and the political ferment outside the academy affected students and faculty alike, giving rise, as Yeh contends, to a sense of alienation on the eve of war.

Selected by the American School Board Journal as a “Must Read” book when it was first published and named one of 60 “Books of the Century” by the University of South Carolina Museum of Education for its influence on American education, this provocative, carefully documented work shows how tracking—the system of grouping students for instruction on the basis of ability—reflects the class and racial inequalities of American society and helps to perpetuate them. For this new edition, Jeannie Oakes has added a new Preface and a new final chapter in which she discusses the “tracking wars” of the last twenty years, wars in which Keeping Track has played a central role. From reviews of the first edition:“Should be read by anyone who wishes to improve schools.”—M. Donald Thomas, American School Board Journal“[This] engaging [book] . . . has had an influence on educational thought and policy that few works of social science ever achieve.”—Tom Loveless in The Tracking Wars“Should be read by teachers, administrators, school board members, and parents.”—Georgia Lewis, Childhood Education“Valuable. . . . No one interested in the topic can afford not to attend to it.”—Kenneth A. Strike, Teachers College Record