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Miseducation: A History of Ignorance-Making in America and Abroad
A provocative collection that explores how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Honorable Mention for the PROSE Education Theory Award of the Association of American Publishers Ignorance, or the study of ignorance, is having a moment. Ignorance plays a powerful role in shaping public opinion, channeling our politics, and even directing scholarly research. The first collection of essays to grapple with the historical interplay between education and ignorance, Miseducation finds ignorance―and its social production through naïveté, passivity, and active agency―at the center of many pivotal historical developments. Ignorance allowed Americans to maintain the institution of slavery, Nazis to promote ideas of race that fomented genocide in the 1930s, and tobacco companies to downplay the dangers of cigarettes. Today, ignorance enables some to deny the fossil record and others to ignore climate science. A. J. Angulo brings together seventeen experts from across the scholarly spectrum to explore how intentional ignorance seeps into formal education. Each chapter identifies education as a critical site for advancing our still-limited understanding of what exactly ignorance is, where it comes from, and how it is diffused, maintained, and regulated in society. Miseducation also challenges the notion that schools are, ideally, unimpeachable sites of knowledge production, access, and equity. By investigating how laws, myths, national aspirations, and global relations have recast and, at times, distorted the key purposes of education, this pathbreaking book sheds light on the role of ignorance in shaping ideas, public opinion, and policy.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2016
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August 8, 2022
An absolute ripper. This book is amazing. Read it before you die. Hell. Read it now.
Firstly I want to say that this is a book dominated by footnotes. It is so magnificent to see big - powerful - courageous footnotes throughout the chapters of this book. This is a big topic, and the writers want to stretch, confirm, verify and argue. And these arguments continue through stunning footnotes. Harvard referencing sucks knowledge from us all.
Publishers - please return footnotes to us.
But the diversity of chapters and authors in this edited collection is fantastic. This would make a brilliant textbook for a graduate course on Ignorance Studies. There is attention to class and sexuality, slavery and intelligent design.
What makes it so powerful is the book's authors unify to probe what has gone wrong in our schools and universities. With all the attention on 'progressive' education, there is a lack of care and focus on the wide space - the intricate space - between 'living' and 'learning.'
Living does not create learning. Indeed, living may be antithetical to learning. This book demonstrates why learning matters, and how to critique the 'truths' we are taught through living, feeling, hoping and believing.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Firstly I want to say that this is a book dominated by footnotes. It is so magnificent to see big - powerful - courageous footnotes throughout the chapters of this book. This is a big topic, and the writers want to stretch, confirm, verify and argue. And these arguments continue through stunning footnotes. Harvard referencing sucks knowledge from us all.
Publishers - please return footnotes to us.
But the diversity of chapters and authors in this edited collection is fantastic. This would make a brilliant textbook for a graduate course on Ignorance Studies. There is attention to class and sexuality, slavery and intelligent design.
What makes it so powerful is the book's authors unify to probe what has gone wrong in our schools and universities. With all the attention on 'progressive' education, there is a lack of care and focus on the wide space - the intricate space - between 'living' and 'learning.'
Living does not create learning. Indeed, living may be antithetical to learning. This book demonstrates why learning matters, and how to critique the 'truths' we are taught through living, feeling, hoping and believing.
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
Displaying 1 of 1 review