John E. Petrovic

Moral Democratic Education and Homosexuality: Censoring morality

With the increasingly heard voices of gays, lesbians and bisexuals in American society and their demands for recognition have come the responses of religious conservatives. In this article I consider whether the extreme moral positions that religious conservatives take are defensible. More specifically, I want to consider whether teachers who embrace such conservative positions should be permitted to act on them in their classrooms. My arguments lead me to distinguish between moral democratic and moralistic positions. The former I examine using the virtue of recognition and the principle of non-oppression. I conclude that democracy requires the positive portrayal of homosexuality in schools and precludes teachers expressing their beliefs against it.

The Politics of Survival in Foundations of Education: Borderlands, Frames, and Strategies

In this article, the authors consider the ways that faculty in the Foundations strategize the placement of Foundations in teacher education in a politics of survival. Drawing on archival and interview data, the authors discuss the strategies invoked as boundary-work. They then situate boundary-work within the broader interpretive lens of cognitive framing. The authors then consider how the very language that faculty members use reveals the cognitive frames that simultaneously inform and shape their strategies. In this way, faculty members strategically invoke and are influenced by larger contemporary discourses. Current strategies, we argue, will tend to reinscribe the existing neoliberal order or substantially dilute the Foundations. The authors call for a new sense of boundary-work by going back to the future and invoking Foundations of disciplines against a current trend of generalism.

Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire, by J. Cummins

(2001). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire, by J. Cummins. Bilingual Research Journal: Vol. 25, Special Issue on Dissertations #2, pp. 405-412.

Language Planning for Equal Educational Opportunity in Multilingual States: The Case of India

This article develops the interface between language policy and planning and equal educational opportunity (EEO). Tracing the trajectory of the development “equal educational opportunity” as a normative ideal, this study argues that language policy must serve to promote “actualist” conceptions of EEO. To do this, acquisition planning, as a component of language planning, must respect the first languages of children in school through the provision of multilingual education. Otherwise, EEO is not served. The study uses the complex case of India and its “three-language formula” to explore the interface between language policy and planning as it relates to EEO, noting the possibilities and challenges that this interface raises in the Indian context.

Invasion, alienation, and imperialist nostalgia: Overcoming the necrophilous nature of neoliberal schools

Abstract The authors present a materialist analysis of the effects of neoliberalism in education. Specifically, they contend that neoliberalism is a form of cultural invasion that begets necrophilia. Neoliberalism is necrophilous in promoting a cultural desire to fix fluid systems and processes. Such desire manufactures both individuals known and culturally felt experiences of alienation which are, it is argued, symptomatic of an imperialist nostalgia that permeates educational policy and practice. The authors point to ‘unschooling in schools’ as a mechanism for resisting the necrophilous tendencies of contemporary formations of education.

Educating for autonomy: Reading Rousseau and Freire toward a philosophy of unschooling:

In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the unschooling movement, highlighting the important philosophical differences, among other differences, between unschooling and homeschooling. They then argue that to the extent that traditional schooling is a project of massification—increasingly dominated by a neoliberal ethos in our contemporary times—as opposed to emancipation, unschooling should be seen as its antithesis, providing an option for parents seeking a truly democratic education. Building on the basic presumption of the importance of autonomy, the authors contend that unschooling provides important insights to democratic education. A model that radicalizes Rousseau through Freire is presented. Specifically, the authors note Rousseau’s injunction to choose between making a person or making a citizen, and then consider Rousseau’s notion of the general will in combination with Freire’s lesson that citizens must engage with the collective in critically transitive ways. Rousseau and Freire can be read together to present a philosophy of unschooling in schools necessary to education for democracy to overcome the massifying, neoliberal impulse of our time.

“Meaningful Educational Opportunity” May Not be Equality of Educational Opportunity [Essay Review of the Book Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity]

In this article, we review a recent analysis of NCLB: Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity by Michael A. Rebell and Jessica R. Wolff. The title of the book leads one to believe that it will provide not just an analysis of NCLB, but a philosophical one, as “meaningful educational opportunity” strikes us as a philosophical construct. The book, however, is much more a legal analysis to the extent that it draws its main arguments from legal precedent. As such, the authors go about their project, to our minds, backwards. They take what has already been said (legally) and attempt to induce an ideal. They argue,