http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
1 online resource (xii, 255 pages) : illustrations
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"--
Preface -- Introduction -- Bureaucratizing the Child: The Manufacture of Adults in the Modern World -- American Mass Public Education and the Modern World -- Bureaucratized Childhood and the Persistence of Schooling Systems: Irrationality in Rationality -- Behaviorism, Developmentalism, and Bureaucracy: Leaky First Graders, Defiant Teenagers, Jocks, Nerds, and the Business Model -- The Sorting Function of Schools: Institutionalized Privilege, and Why Harvard is a Social Problem for both the Middle Class, and Public School 65 in The Bronx -- Teachers, Parents, and the Teaching Profession: The Miracle of Bureaucratized Love -- The Child Savers -- Seeing Like a State: Efficiency, Calculability, Predictivity, Control, Testing Regimes and School Administration -- The Limits of the Modern American School: Rock, Paper, Scissors (Equality, Individualism, Utilitarianism) -- The Modern World and Mass Public Education: Bureaucratized Schools around the World -- Why School Reform Will Always Be With Us: Emotion and Rationalization -- From Spoiled Blueberries to Classical Social Theory.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Cultural Policy
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural