Retooling the Mind Factory: Education in a Lean State - Softcover

Sears, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551930447 ISBN 13: 9781551930442

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2003

Synopsis

Alan Sears examines education reform in relation to a broad process of cultural and economic change. His book makes the case that education reform is one aspect of a broad-ranging neo-liberal agenda that aims to push the market deeper into every aspect of our lives by eliminating or shrinking non-market alternatives. The author begins by showing that advocates of education reform have had to make the case that the current system is not working. This sets the ground for an examination of the so-called 'Common Sense Revolution,' a claim that drastic change was required to redesign government policies to fit a changing world. Lean production methods are a crucial component of this changing world, and broader social and cultural change is now required to consolidate the emerging order built on the spread of these methods. Education reform is designed to recast the relations of citizenship, contributing to the cultural and social change promoted through the social policy of the lean state.

About this title

About the Author

Alan Sears is Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the author of The New Left: A History of the Future (2014) and co-author with James Cairns of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (2012).

Review

Highly readable, well-argued, timely, covering issues of substanital public and academic interest... The analysis provides an important antidote to conventional discourses on education, at the same time that it provides connections with significant bodies of critical literature.

(Terry Wotherspoon, University of Saskatchewan)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1551930447
• ISBN 13: 9781551930442
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288