Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education

This book questions the consensus that contemporary formal schooling is of clear cut and undoubted benefit to pupils. During lockdowns caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic, governments and various other actors have been trying to get children and young people back into school as quickly as possible. While there are any numerous beneficial aspects of schooling, the book asks whether accepted models and practices of schools should change in a post-COVID world. By critically examining the everyday nature of 'normal' schooling, the book demonstrates that many aspects of schooling are not necessarily beneficial to pupils, and can be directly harmful: in doing so, the author imagines a future of schooling that could better support and benefit its students.

This book analyses educational theory in order to offer an alternative view of the history of education in modernity. It provides a new understanding of education as a phenomenon that draws on powerful lines of thinking, but also makes a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of both education policy and education studies. These perspectives offer an original and challenging account of what education is and of what politics has become, providing resources to rethink education as a fundamental dimension of the unprecedented political order of our time. It does this through a focus on what it takes to be the key, complex and expanding political apparatus of education. Taking the school to be the paradigm institution of modernity and beyond, the book proposes that we see the school as central to contemporary political ontology.