Education and the Politics of Interruption

Does the Right Always Win?

Michael W. Apple, Iana Gomes De Lima, Luis Armando Gandin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040687642
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Education has become a crucial site of struggle in multiple nations of the world. Education and the Politics of Interruption examines how governments, schools, educators, communities, and parents have become central figures in the conflicts between authoritarian coalitions and progressive educational and social movements. In recent years, educators around the world have experienced increasingly influential and powerful attempts by the right to ban books from classrooms and libraries, silence diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, control what and whose knowledge is taught in classrooms, and push policies that defund public schools, increase the pressure for marketization, and assert "parental choice." This book describes ongoing alliances and organizing efforts across the globe that work to build and defend critically democratic educational policies and practices amid the growing rightist ideological and legislative influences. It provides substantive critical analyses of conservative and authoritarian agendas in education, exposes the social and educational costs of these agendas, and documents the ongoing struggles against them. In the process, it broadens our understanding of how people can defend and expand critically democratic schooling and cooperate across differing ideological agendas. This volume will be important reading for critical educators and for scholars and students of Critical Education, Curriculum Studies, Education Politics and Policy, Social Justice, Sociology of Education, and Comparative Education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Understanding Education and the Politics of Interruption
• 1 United States: Can We Win? Social Mobilizations and the Politics of Official Knowledge
• 2 England: Learning to Fear: How Islamophobia Is Manufactured, Made Educational, and Resisted
• 3 Poland: The Empire Strikes Back: A Neoconservative Revolution in Polish Schools and the Struggles Against It
• 4 Australia: Teacher Union Resistance to the Impacts of Marketised and Neoliberal Restructurings: The More than Thanks campaign by the New South Wales Teachers Federation
• 5 Brazil: Brazil’s Black Movement and Policies for Racial Equality in an Antidemocratic Period
• 6 Chile: Standardization Policies and the Teacher Career Law in Chile and Its Resistances: When the Right Doesn’t Always Win, Even If It Wins
• 7 Japan: Ecological Interventions in the Postwar Politics of Japanese Education: Reassessing the Japanese Language and Moral Education Debates
• 8 India: Reforming the ‘Right’ Way: Market, Hypernationalism, and Curriculum Vigilantism in Indian Higher Education
• Understanding and Interrupting the Right: What We Have Learned?
• List of Contributors
• Index