Schooling, childhood, and bureaucracy : bureaucratizing the child /
This book uses sociological explanations to describe how the school system in the United States developed, and why reform is a constant. The explanation is rooted in the rationalized nature of bureaucracy, the ideals underlying society, and childhood. Highlighted is the tension between the love that...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Palgrave Macmillan,
2012.
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| Edition: | 1st ed. |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book uses sociological explanations to describe how the school system in the United States developed, and why reform is a constant. The explanation is rooted in the rationalized nature of bureaucracy, the ideals underlying society, and childhood. Highlighted is the tension between the love that parents feel for their individual children, and the rational demands of a bureaucracy to manage a mass produced product₇education. The American public school system is elemental to the reproduction of society's ideals. Such ideals in turn effect how relationships between teachers, parents, children, schools, and the state develop. Most notably, this results in chronic demands for reform when inevitably the high ideals for individual children in terms of 'school success,' defined as test scores, student behavior, equity, and so forth, are never quite achieved. The reasons why are embedded in a tension between bureaucracy, and the love individual parents have for individual children. In exploring the relationship between bureaucratic schooling and the individual child, my book describes the persistence of educational inequality, child development, and the nature of bureaucracy. The conclusions point out how education bureaucracies frame both schooling and childhood as they relentlessly seek to create ever more perfect children. "This book is about how modern American childhood is shaped by the bureaucratic tools including mass testing, child psychology, and the status hiearchies. This happens in a world where there is an emotional attachment to children in which no child can be left behind, even as the bureaucracies pragmatically sort through individuals of differing abilities. The result is childhoods shaped to meet competing American ideals for individualism, egalitarianism, and utililitarianism. The result is a conservative bureaucratic dance which resembles a game of rochambo, as individualism is trumped by egalitarianism, utilitarianism by individualism, and utilitarianism by egalitarianism"-- |
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| Item Description: | Electronic resource. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 255 pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781137269720 (electronic bk.) 1137269723 (electronic bk.) |