Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. College movies s... more Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. College movies such as The Paper Chase (1973), Animal House (1978), and Higher Learning (1995) provide insight into the ways that college has been variously imagined as a middle class rite of passage, a landscape of hedonistic fantasy, a microcosm of societal hypocrisy, a repressive system of deindividuation, and a carnivalesque holiday from "real life." This unique volume examines the representation of college and campus life in movies. Chapters discuss the extent to which movies about college inform the expectations, perceptions, and attitudes of students, faculty, and the public. Cinema U includes close analysis of individual films as well as broader examinations of the manner in which college films have addressed issues such as race, class, gender, technology, sexuality, and cultural difference.
To be a child in the 21 st Century is increasingly synonymous with facing some form of jeopardy. ... more To be a child in the 21 st Century is increasingly synonymous with facing some form of jeopardy. In the context of the United States, Jonathan Zimmerman recently claimed that adults' nostalgia for their own childhoods has led to outmoded or even draconian school policies in the present. 1 Steven Mintz has argued that a close examination of public policy in the U.S. reveals that the country is much less child-friendly than its rhetoric suggests. 2 In a broader context, Aparna Mishra Tarc says that: [children] are shielded from worldly affairs; they are deemed a problem for adults and are dismissed; or, they are used as agents of adult interests and policies. Furthermore, education that supposedly facilitates the child's democratic participation can devolve collapse into tautological lessons that pervert knowledge for adult ends, as do other adult-invested forms of teaching. 3
Richard Qunatz"s new text, Rituals and Student Identity in Education, offers an insightful new pe... more Richard Qunatz"s new text, Rituals and Student Identity in Education, offers an insightful new perspective on education in the 21 st century by examining the nonrational aspects of education and the importance of ritual performance. The text confronts the current environment in public education where standardization and accountability are the modus operandi. Quantz challenges the reader to reconsider those spaces within classrooms and schools that can be neither quantified nor commodified by the rational methodologies that dominate current educational discourse. Quantz contends that the problems with education today are not found in a lack of methods or "best practices," but rather, in a lack of an understanding of the cultures and politics of the students, teachers, and communities that are the heart of American schools. In the end, the answers for what troubles education today can be found within the nonrational aspects of those cultural and political spaces that all students and teachers must navigate on a daily basis. Quantz opens his text with a discussion of the rational in education. It is here that he grounds his argument against what he perceives as our national obsession with rationality in education. Within formal public education, the rational is found in the policies and procedures that promote evaluating and quantifying student mastery of objectified curricula as the most important function of schooling. Quantz argues, "Never has rationality been stressed more than under the "No Child Left Behind" policies that emphasize explicit outcomes, precise measures, and "research-based instruction."" (Quantz, 2011). This refutation of current national education policy lies at the heart of Quantz"s promoting ritual critique of nonrational performance as paramount to resisting the standardization that stifles our public schools. Chapter one explicitly counters the idea of rationality in education by tracing the idea of the nonrational in the works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, all of whom challenged the idea that human beings act rationally within economic and social exchanges. The nonrational, where Quantz proceeds to focus his argument, exists in those unquantifiable and unpredictable behaviors and actions that emerge while human beings interact with each other and the environment. As Marx and Weber saw rationalization as leading to the creation of bureaucracies that dehumanized society, the author contends that rationalization also works against the humanizing aspects of public education. In chapter two the reader is asked to reconsider the common understanding of ritual as something that is simply habitual. One often thinks of ritual as a behavior void of real meaning, such as an athlete eating a specific pre-game meal in hopes it brings luck in the game, or the teacher who must begin each morning by drinking a cup of coffee while reading New York Times
But my death-my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling g... more But my death-my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden-would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.-Roquentin (in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea) We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. This accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody.-Rust Cohle (in HBO's True Detective)
In writing Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education, Kip Kline has perfo... more In writing Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education, Kip Kline has performed what I see as an extraordinarily valuable service to our field. Bringing the thought of Baudrillard into the fold of educational theorizing is critical not simply as an expansion of the theoretical resources available to philosophers of education, but also because Baudrillard brings with him a much-needed critique of the way our discipline has traditionally gone about its own critical task. One of the central claims of the book is that ideological critiques of content have become outmoded and unproductive against the recent iterations of global capitalism (evidenced in Kline's discussion of critical media literacy in Chapter Four). Kline, along with Baudrillard, suggest the need for a shift to analyses on the level of form, a la McLuhan's famous contention that "the medium is the message." This insight is long overdue in educational thinking and critique. Specifica...
Marxian education scholars have successfully established critical media literacy as a specific re... more Marxian education scholars have successfully established critical media literacy as a specific response to concerns about contemporary media's problems and possibilities with regard to youth. This development has made a significant contribution to the intersection of media, critical theory, and pedagogy. Yet, the theoretical foundations of critical media literacy limit its capacity to confront the trajectory of contemporary media and communication technologies. Here, Kip Kline offers Jean Baudrillard's media theory as a possible corrective to the undertheorization of media at the level of form that contributes to the inefficacy of critical media literacy.
Cornel West has said that the best kind of education is one in which a student realizes that his ... more Cornel West has said that the best kind of education is one in which a student realizes that his or her “worldview rests on pudding.” He is also fond of describing the same notion as a necessary and good kind of “unhousing” of parochial beliefs. This seems to be related to what Peter Roberts has in mind in his description and defense of despair’s role in education. He says, “Education promotes not greater certainty but greater doubt — and with doubt can come despair.” Roberts’s essay, “Education, Faith, and Despair: Wrestling with Kierkegaard,” successfully examines this seminal notion of Kierkegaard’s in light of philosophical thought in education. That there is some kind of relationship between education and despair that is worthy of exploration is made clear through the essay. Ultimately, Roberts makes three arguments related to despair and education: (1) Contrary to a common belief, despair is not a problem requiring a solution. (2) Education, rather than assisting us in averting despair, can be a force that deepens it. And (3) this is not a reason to avoid education. On the contrary, it provides an impetus for pursuing education all the more.
Abstract The HBO series, Westworld, challenges our notions about what might be real. As such, the... more Abstract The HBO series, Westworld, challenges our notions about what might be real. As such, the series provides a provoking platform for exploring an oft—neglected topic in contemporary education-the fetishization of technology and the murder of the real in Jean Baudrillard's sense. Current educational systems in Canada and the United States (and elsewhere) depend on an outmoded commitment to a world in which reality is assumed to be unobscured, but Westworld provides a provocative platform to renegotiate this assumption. There are consequences for a world in which simulacra have displaced the real, and these need to be explored in the context of education and beyond.
“I think education is about people and it’s kind of messy and not, maybe, quite as standardizable... more “I think education is about people and it’s kind of messy and not, maybe, quite as standardizable as someone might think. I am fundamentally not interested in enacting other people’s plans. There’s no creativity in that, there is no opportunity to use what I know in that situation, and also I think it’s a slap in the face to me as a professional.” Stephanie found that it was impossible to exercise her moral agency and teach “right” within policy mandates that dismissed her pedagogical knowledge, constrained her pedagogical judgment, and so tightly circumscribed her pedagogical authority.1 Stephanie is one of a number of teachers interviewed in Doris Santoro’s powerful study of those she calls “principled leavers” 2 of the profession. Scores of teachers find something that resonates with the frustration and disillusionment expressed by Stephanie in the era of accountability. This era has introduced educational policies emphasizing standardized content knowledge as well as (allegedly) quantifiable evaluations of student progress shaping teacher evaluations. In its wake, the opportunities for teachers to be active agents, enacting embodied, relational, and reasoning pedagogies, are dwindling. Accountability curriculum and testing policies have increased the rate at which teaching has become a deskilled profession, a concept over three decades old but which has been recently revived, intensified, and amplified. 3 Canned curricula, the overemphasis of standardized test scores, and the general technicization and mechanization of the teaching profession has left many teachers facing what Stephen Ball calls the “terrors of performativity.” 4 These terrors pressure teachers to perform various routinized and prescribed subject positions, none of which seem to involve any sense of their own powers as actors who use critical intelligence to evaluate, judge, and shape their own practice. There is certainly “no creativity in that,” as Stephanie well knows. It is fair to say that the net result of the current policy trajectory in schools is the disappearance of the teacher as a certain kind of subject position. 5 Constitutive of the disappearance of teachers are the ways in which the ethical subjectivities of individual teachers are marginalized and often completely usurped by the accountability environment. The encroachment on the messy ambiguities connoting human elements of teaching involves not simply the denial of teacher professionalism and agency, but the political consequences of what John Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” 6 This quest, in our current era of education, squelches any sense of the ambiguity that Simone de Beauvoir claimed was fundamental to being human. She writes, “Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.” 7 Schools operate now (and perhaps always did) in ways
Schools continue to purchase and install machines and practices from the world of communications ... more Schools continue to purchase and install machines and practices from the world of communications technology. In turn, students and teachers are purported to be more “connected,” and this connectivity is widely viewed as having a positive influence on teaching and learning. In this essay, however, we argue that not only are these claims about better teaching and learning specious, but that the largely unreflective and zealous pursuit of new technologies by schools amounts to an acceptance of technological determinism and an adoption of a set of non-neutral ontological assumptions. Human interaction is always interpreted, but the mitigation of technology raises important questions about the assumed neutrality of “technological innovation.” Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, recently claimed that “the internet is broken.” His chief concerns include the degree to which Facebook livestreams suicides, Twitter trolls attack people with abandon, and “news links” lead to falsehoods. The as...
Twelve years ago, Bill Joy—computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems— declared that “... more Twelve years ago, Bill Joy—computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems— declared that “the future” doesn’t need human beings. 1 If he is right, the future certainly doesn’t need teachers. Or at the very least, if we are not completely given to Joy’s provocative assertion, we still must confront the possibility of a future in which the human element in teaching is on the wane. In fact, many teachers experience this not as a possible future, but as part of the felt experience of their current situation. The “new breed of accountability-driven schools is more interested in reaching some number at the end of the school year” than in actually constructing places where teachers can create meaningful learning experiences for students. 2 Educational systems increasingly reward the most machine-like teachers; those who focus fully on achieving the highest test scores and the most efficient use of instructional time toward that end. Curricula are increasingly evaluated and adopted b...
Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. College movies s... more Movies about college have been a staple of American cinema since the silent era. College movies such as The Paper Chase (1973), Animal House (1978), and Higher Learning (1995) provide insight into the ways that college has been variously imagined as a middle class rite of passage, a landscape of hedonistic fantasy, a microcosm of societal hypocrisy, a repressive system of deindividuation, and a carnivalesque holiday from "real life." This unique volume examines the representation of college and campus life in movies. Chapters discuss the extent to which movies about college inform the expectations, perceptions, and attitudes of students, faculty, and the public. Cinema U includes close analysis of individual films as well as broader examinations of the manner in which college films have addressed issues such as race, class, gender, technology, sexuality, and cultural difference.
To be a child in the 21 st Century is increasingly synonymous with facing some form of jeopardy. ... more To be a child in the 21 st Century is increasingly synonymous with facing some form of jeopardy. In the context of the United States, Jonathan Zimmerman recently claimed that adults' nostalgia for their own childhoods has led to outmoded or even draconian school policies in the present. 1 Steven Mintz has argued that a close examination of public policy in the U.S. reveals that the country is much less child-friendly than its rhetoric suggests. 2 In a broader context, Aparna Mishra Tarc says that: [children] are shielded from worldly affairs; they are deemed a problem for adults and are dismissed; or, they are used as agents of adult interests and policies. Furthermore, education that supposedly facilitates the child's democratic participation can devolve collapse into tautological lessons that pervert knowledge for adult ends, as do other adult-invested forms of teaching. 3
Richard Qunatz"s new text, Rituals and Student Identity in Education, offers an insightful new pe... more Richard Qunatz"s new text, Rituals and Student Identity in Education, offers an insightful new perspective on education in the 21 st century by examining the nonrational aspects of education and the importance of ritual performance. The text confronts the current environment in public education where standardization and accountability are the modus operandi. Quantz challenges the reader to reconsider those spaces within classrooms and schools that can be neither quantified nor commodified by the rational methodologies that dominate current educational discourse. Quantz contends that the problems with education today are not found in a lack of methods or "best practices," but rather, in a lack of an understanding of the cultures and politics of the students, teachers, and communities that are the heart of American schools. In the end, the answers for what troubles education today can be found within the nonrational aspects of those cultural and political spaces that all students and teachers must navigate on a daily basis. Quantz opens his text with a discussion of the rational in education. It is here that he grounds his argument against what he perceives as our national obsession with rationality in education. Within formal public education, the rational is found in the policies and procedures that promote evaluating and quantifying student mastery of objectified curricula as the most important function of schooling. Quantz argues, "Never has rationality been stressed more than under the "No Child Left Behind" policies that emphasize explicit outcomes, precise measures, and "research-based instruction."" (Quantz, 2011). This refutation of current national education policy lies at the heart of Quantz"s promoting ritual critique of nonrational performance as paramount to resisting the standardization that stifles our public schools. Chapter one explicitly counters the idea of rationality in education by tracing the idea of the nonrational in the works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, all of whom challenged the idea that human beings act rationally within economic and social exchanges. The nonrational, where Quantz proceeds to focus his argument, exists in those unquantifiable and unpredictable behaviors and actions that emerge while human beings interact with each other and the environment. As Marx and Weber saw rationalization as leading to the creation of bureaucracies that dehumanized society, the author contends that rationalization also works against the humanizing aspects of public education. In chapter two the reader is asked to reconsider the common understanding of ritual as something that is simply habitual. One often thinks of ritual as a behavior void of real meaning, such as an athlete eating a specific pre-game meal in hopes it brings luck in the game, or the teacher who must begin each morning by drinking a cup of coffee while reading New York Times
But my death-my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling g... more But my death-my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden-would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity.-Roquentin (in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea) We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. This accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody.-Rust Cohle (in HBO's True Detective)
In writing Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education, Kip Kline has perfo... more In writing Baudrillard, Youth, and American Film: Fatal Theory and Education, Kip Kline has performed what I see as an extraordinarily valuable service to our field. Bringing the thought of Baudrillard into the fold of educational theorizing is critical not simply as an expansion of the theoretical resources available to philosophers of education, but also because Baudrillard brings with him a much-needed critique of the way our discipline has traditionally gone about its own critical task. One of the central claims of the book is that ideological critiques of content have become outmoded and unproductive against the recent iterations of global capitalism (evidenced in Kline's discussion of critical media literacy in Chapter Four). Kline, along with Baudrillard, suggest the need for a shift to analyses on the level of form, a la McLuhan's famous contention that "the medium is the message." This insight is long overdue in educational thinking and critique. Specifica...
Marxian education scholars have successfully established critical media literacy as a specific re... more Marxian education scholars have successfully established critical media literacy as a specific response to concerns about contemporary media's problems and possibilities with regard to youth. This development has made a significant contribution to the intersection of media, critical theory, and pedagogy. Yet, the theoretical foundations of critical media literacy limit its capacity to confront the trajectory of contemporary media and communication technologies. Here, Kip Kline offers Jean Baudrillard's media theory as a possible corrective to the undertheorization of media at the level of form that contributes to the inefficacy of critical media literacy.
Cornel West has said that the best kind of education is one in which a student realizes that his ... more Cornel West has said that the best kind of education is one in which a student realizes that his or her “worldview rests on pudding.” He is also fond of describing the same notion as a necessary and good kind of “unhousing” of parochial beliefs. This seems to be related to what Peter Roberts has in mind in his description and defense of despair’s role in education. He says, “Education promotes not greater certainty but greater doubt — and with doubt can come despair.” Roberts’s essay, “Education, Faith, and Despair: Wrestling with Kierkegaard,” successfully examines this seminal notion of Kierkegaard’s in light of philosophical thought in education. That there is some kind of relationship between education and despair that is worthy of exploration is made clear through the essay. Ultimately, Roberts makes three arguments related to despair and education: (1) Contrary to a common belief, despair is not a problem requiring a solution. (2) Education, rather than assisting us in averting despair, can be a force that deepens it. And (3) this is not a reason to avoid education. On the contrary, it provides an impetus for pursuing education all the more.
Abstract The HBO series, Westworld, challenges our notions about what might be real. As such, the... more Abstract The HBO series, Westworld, challenges our notions about what might be real. As such, the series provides a provoking platform for exploring an oft—neglected topic in contemporary education-the fetishization of technology and the murder of the real in Jean Baudrillard's sense. Current educational systems in Canada and the United States (and elsewhere) depend on an outmoded commitment to a world in which reality is assumed to be unobscured, but Westworld provides a provocative platform to renegotiate this assumption. There are consequences for a world in which simulacra have displaced the real, and these need to be explored in the context of education and beyond.
“I think education is about people and it’s kind of messy and not, maybe, quite as standardizable... more “I think education is about people and it’s kind of messy and not, maybe, quite as standardizable as someone might think. I am fundamentally not interested in enacting other people’s plans. There’s no creativity in that, there is no opportunity to use what I know in that situation, and also I think it’s a slap in the face to me as a professional.” Stephanie found that it was impossible to exercise her moral agency and teach “right” within policy mandates that dismissed her pedagogical knowledge, constrained her pedagogical judgment, and so tightly circumscribed her pedagogical authority.1 Stephanie is one of a number of teachers interviewed in Doris Santoro’s powerful study of those she calls “principled leavers” 2 of the profession. Scores of teachers find something that resonates with the frustration and disillusionment expressed by Stephanie in the era of accountability. This era has introduced educational policies emphasizing standardized content knowledge as well as (allegedly) quantifiable evaluations of student progress shaping teacher evaluations. In its wake, the opportunities for teachers to be active agents, enacting embodied, relational, and reasoning pedagogies, are dwindling. Accountability curriculum and testing policies have increased the rate at which teaching has become a deskilled profession, a concept over three decades old but which has been recently revived, intensified, and amplified. 3 Canned curricula, the overemphasis of standardized test scores, and the general technicization and mechanization of the teaching profession has left many teachers facing what Stephen Ball calls the “terrors of performativity.” 4 These terrors pressure teachers to perform various routinized and prescribed subject positions, none of which seem to involve any sense of their own powers as actors who use critical intelligence to evaluate, judge, and shape their own practice. There is certainly “no creativity in that,” as Stephanie well knows. It is fair to say that the net result of the current policy trajectory in schools is the disappearance of the teacher as a certain kind of subject position. 5 Constitutive of the disappearance of teachers are the ways in which the ethical subjectivities of individual teachers are marginalized and often completely usurped by the accountability environment. The encroachment on the messy ambiguities connoting human elements of teaching involves not simply the denial of teacher professionalism and agency, but the political consequences of what John Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” 6 This quest, in our current era of education, squelches any sense of the ambiguity that Simone de Beauvoir claimed was fundamental to being human. She writes, “Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.” 7 Schools operate now (and perhaps always did) in ways
Schools continue to purchase and install machines and practices from the world of communications ... more Schools continue to purchase and install machines and practices from the world of communications technology. In turn, students and teachers are purported to be more “connected,” and this connectivity is widely viewed as having a positive influence on teaching and learning. In this essay, however, we argue that not only are these claims about better teaching and learning specious, but that the largely unreflective and zealous pursuit of new technologies by schools amounts to an acceptance of technological determinism and an adoption of a set of non-neutral ontological assumptions. Human interaction is always interpreted, but the mitigation of technology raises important questions about the assumed neutrality of “technological innovation.” Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, recently claimed that “the internet is broken.” His chief concerns include the degree to which Facebook livestreams suicides, Twitter trolls attack people with abandon, and “news links” lead to falsehoods. The as...
Twelve years ago, Bill Joy—computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems— declared that “... more Twelve years ago, Bill Joy—computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems— declared that “the future” doesn’t need human beings. 1 If he is right, the future certainly doesn’t need teachers. Or at the very least, if we are not completely given to Joy’s provocative assertion, we still must confront the possibility of a future in which the human element in teaching is on the wane. In fact, many teachers experience this not as a possible future, but as part of the felt experience of their current situation. The “new breed of accountability-driven schools is more interested in reaching some number at the end of the school year” than in actually constructing places where teachers can create meaningful learning experiences for students. 2 Educational systems increasingly reward the most machine-like teachers; those who focus fully on achieving the highest test scores and the most efficient use of instructional time toward that end. Curricula are increasingly evaluated and adopted b...
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