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Renee Tougas's avatar

You ask, “Where have I not dug?”

Everything you describe here is social but all of these social shifts/conditions have political and economic roots, or if not roots per se, political and economic co-factors.

For example, as things start to become more economically unstable for families, when parents start to feel that the future for their children is not better (economically or in other ways) parenting becomes more intense. Parents want to secure places for their children in a competitive and unknown future and so they work to do so. And this is labour and of course not all parents have the time/resources for this labour so there is equity issues also.

I love this part:

"I began to interrogate, for the first time, my own motherhood. A rebel mother, that's how I thought of myself, eschewing the system, homeschooling with my kids. Pushing back on what culture demanded of me, of my children. But often, I see now, I sailed along with the culture, let it shape me. I did not always recognize a choice that could be made."

I see this in my own experience also. How shaped by culture I actually am, not quite the rebel I thought myself to be. :)

I'd encourage you to investigate neoliberal influences on education, which has a straight throughline for at least 6 of the above bullet points. Neoliberalism is a suite of political and economic ideologies (premised on a particular take on philosophical liberalism) that were/are infused into cultural discourse and also, importantly, is instantiated in policies.

If you ever want to talk neoliberalism and education I'd be happy to do so as I've been researching/studying this for my masters. I've written one peer-reviewed journal paper on the topic and currently working on my next.

anyway, great topic. Happy to be reading you wherever you publish!

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Adrian Neibauer's avatar

As a classroom teacher, I’m most familiar with, and upset by, the passage of NCLB in 2001. I’ve struggled with subverting standardized testing, textbook-based and test-driven curricula. It’s an uphill struggle!

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