Discourse, Power, Resistance : Challenging the Rhetoric of Contemporary Education

This work exposes the practices that are controlling education and reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work.

It is a call to educators to recognize and resist the rhetoric around education and to question oppressive practices.

The contributors reveal how persuasively students all over the world are being controlled by education.

It offers the example of the rise of testing and accountability, arguing that it has fostered the decline of teacher professionalism and local control, thus achieving compliance and making contestation all but impossible.

It questions the strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

In Part Two of the text, it suggests ways in which to provoke and enable students to critique the system, resist their educational oppression and take greater control of their learning.

The text should be useful for students, teachers, trainers, lecturers, and researchers.