This concise, introductory book by internationally renowned scholar Jean Anyon centers on the ideas of Marx that have been used in education studies as a guide to theory, analysis, research, and practice.

Dialectics of Education is a rich collection of essays analyzing both the role of education in shaping ideology in the United States and the political implications of struggles for educational justice. This book seeks to recover and reframe the dialectical materialist tradition in critical education, studies and carries this tradition forward into theory and practice relevant for today. Building on the tradition of the groundbreaking book Schooling in Capitalist America that was first published in 1976, author Wayne Au presents a Marxist perspective on educational policies and pedagogy and the highlights the potential for struggle in both the political arena and the classroom. This book is an essential tool in the growing resistance against the privatization of education and for the struggle for educational rights for all students regardless of ethnicity or social status.

This book introduces the student to the various phenomenological and humanistic Marxist perspectives as they are being applied to education and provides an account of the strengths and weaknesses of these perspectives, drawing on a variety of disciplines in order to explain the controversies described. The opening chapters deal with the phenomenological perspective in the sociology of education, discussing its adoption of a phenomenological model of man, its use of anthropological studies, the importance of classroom studies, and its rejection of the 'liberal' philosophy of education. The aim is to show the significance of these ideas for education, with a discussion of the concept of alienation and schooling, developments in Marxism such as the focus on the mode of production and the labour process, and the political economy of education.

We live in a world where thousands make massive profits out of the labours of others, while those others exist as wage slaves, millions of whom die of starvation and poverty-related illness every year. The fundamental aim of Marxism is the overthrow of the anarchic, exploitative and eco-destructive system of world capitalism and its replacement by world socialism and equality. To build a socialist world is a task of gargantuan proportions, but one that Marxists believe is eminently achievable. This book addresses some of these challenges from within educational theory. The key theoretical issues addressed are: utopian socialism poststructuralism and postmodernism transmodernism globalisation, neo-liberalism and environmental destruction the new imperialism critical race theory. Marxism and Educational Theory compellingly and informatively propels the debate forward in the pursuit of that socialist future. In that quest, suggestions are made to connect theoretical issues with the more practical concerns of the school and the classroom. With a specially written Foreword by Peter McLaren, this timely book will be of interest to academics and students interested in educational theory, the sociology of education, sociology, politics, philosophy and critical theory.

Introduction / Dave Hill, Kostas Skordoulis, and Lotar Rasinski -- European Education Policy and Critical Education / George Grollios -- The Schooling of Teachers in England: Rescuing Pedagogy / Gail Edwards -- Transformation In The Teaching Profession In Turkey: From Socialist- Idealist Teacher To Exam-Oriented Technician / Ahmet Yildiz -- Education, Secularism and Secular Education in Turkey / Unal Ozmen -- Assessing the Effects of the Economic crisis on Public Education in Greece / Theopoula-Polina Chrysochou -- The Endpoint of Expectation from Education, the Starting Point of Struggle: A Critical Approach to White-Collar Unemployment / Aygulen Kayahan Karakul -- The Position of an Educational Researchers in a Semi-Peripheral Region: Critical Autoethnography of an Academic Subject in Hungary / György Mészáros -- Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy and the Struggle against Capital Today / Peter McLaren and Derek R. Ford -- Considerations on a Marxist Pedagogy of Science / Kostas Skordoulis -- "A picture held us captive ..." Marx, Wittgenstein and the "Paradox of Ideology" / Lotar Rasinski -- Empowerment in Education: a New Logic of Emancipation or a New Logic of Power? / Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-Bak -- Marxist Education Against Capitalism in Neoliberal / Neoconservative Times / Dave Hill

This Encyclopaedia of Marxism and Education showcases the explanatory power of Marxist educational theory and practice.

The Critical Turn in Education traces the historical emergence and development of critical theories in the field of education, from the introduction of Marxist and other radical social theories in the 1960s to the contemporary critical landscape. The book begins by tracing the first waves of critical scholarship in the field through a close, contextual study of the intellectual and political projects of several core figures including, Paulo Freire, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux. Later chapters offer a discussion of feminist critiques, the influx of postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas in education, and critical theories of race. While grounded in U.S. scholarship, The Critical Turn in Education contextualizes the development of critical ideas and political projects within a larger international history, and charts the ongoing theoretical debates that seek to explain the relationship between school and society. Today, much of the language of this critical turn has now become commonplace—words such as "hegemony," "ideology," and the term "critical" itself—but by providing a historical analysis, The Critical Turn in Education illuminates the complexity and nuance of these theoretical tools, which offer ways of understanding the intersections between individual identities and structural forces in an attempt to engage and overturn social injustice.