Michael Apple offers a powerful analysis of current debates and a compelling indictment of rightist proposals for change. Apple presents the causes and effects of further integrating schools into the corporate agenda, as well as current calls for a national curriculum and national testing, privatization and voucher plans, and fundamentalist religious pressures to censor textbooks. He demonstrates who will be the winners and losers culturally and economically as the conservative restoration gains in strength, bringing with it an even greater restratification of knowledge and students in terms of race, class, and gender.

"Innovative study of the cultural legacy of the Mexican Revolution, using the story of rural schools. Focuses on Puebla and Sonora and the attempt by the central government to implement socialist education and to advance its nationalist agenda. Stresses the importance of negotiation among national and local leaders, teachers and peasants"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

In academia, the effects of the "cultural turn" have been felt deeply. In everyday life, tenets from cultural politics have influenced how people behave or regard their options for action, such as the reconfiguration of social movements, protests, and praxis in general. Many authors writing in this field are known for their scholarship and social activism, both of which are arguably guided by principles of cultural politics about the nature of representation and the deployment of power in political discourses. The Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education is less an attempt to standardize contemporary educational scholarship and more a collection that engages the problems and promises of recent themes in social and cultural thought, which require our attention and demand a response. In other words, it opens doors to questions rather than convenient answers to difficult educational dilemmas. The Handbook is part of the appraisal of an opening created by interdisciplinary writings on such themes as representation, civil society, cultural struggle, subjectivity, and media within the context of education. Indeed cultural politics troubles traditional frameworks in search of critical explanations concerning education's place within society. The contributions in the collection support this endeavor. "In these difficult times, critical pedagogy needs all the theoretical inspiration it can muster. This formidable collection of provocative texts, skillfully edited by Zeus Leonardo, draws on a wide range of ideas from leading contemporary theorists and imaginatively applies their lessons to the thorny problems of the real world." - Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley. "This volume is a cutting-edge contribution to the study of cultural politics in education. Chapter authors affirm the critical role of culture as a set of material practices; they excavate and develop foundational thinking on ideology, discourse, race, and the array of post-studies in social theory. The book is at once an accessible introduction to, and a brilliant advancement of, the field of cultural analysis." - Jean Anyon, Professor of Urban Education at City University of New York, Graduate Center and author of Ghetto Schooling.

Education and Cultural Politics: Interrogating Idiotic Education is a conceptualization of protest and resistance against the cultural politics of oppression and domination of people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America. It is also a theorization of their redemption from being victims of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism. The book combines the theoretical models of discrimination and oppression through the use of the axis of the social evils to critically analyze the cultural politics of education in relation to black people in the African Diaspora. It does this through the lens of critical redemptive education which is seen through an Afrocentric philosophy. The book illustrates how the lives of black people are constructed by slavery and colonialism which have etched their mores into the black psyche. The book advocates the view that slavocracy, the colonial construction of black psyche, is not indelible. It can be deconstructed through conscience and reconstructed through a non-idiotic, liberatory education using the philosophy of critical redemptive education which fosters a genuine koinonia among black communities serving as the antidote for the current black nihilism in black communities which is the legacy of our oppressive existence.

In academia, the effects of the “cultural turn” have been felt deeply. In everyday life, tenets from cultural politics have influenced how people behave or regard their options for action, such as the reconfiguration of social movements, protests, and praxis in general.

While attention has been paid to various aspects of music education in China, to date no single publication has systematically addressed the complex interplay of sociopolitical transformations underlying the development of popular music and music education in the multilevel culture of China. Before the implementation of the new curriculum reforms in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was neither Chinese nor Western popular music in textbook materials. Popular culture had long been prohibited in school music education by China’s strong revolutionary orientation, which feared ‘spiritual pollution’ by Western cultures. However, since the early twenty-first century, education reform has attempted to help students deal with experiences in their daily lives and has officially included learning the canon of popular music in the music curriculum. In relation to this topic, this book analyses how social transformation and cultural politics have affected community relations and the transmission of popular music through school music education. Ho presents music and music education as sociopolitical constructions of nationalism and globalization. Moreover, how popular music is received in national and global contexts and how it affects the construction of social and musical meanings in school music education, as well as the reformation of music education in mainland China, is discussed. Based on the perspectives of school music teachers and students, the findings of the empirical studies in this book address the power and potential use of popular music in school music education as a producer and reproducer of cultural politics in the music curriculum in the mainland.