Since 2012, corporations, politicians, journalists and educators have asserted that MOOCs--massive open online courses--are radically changing North American and global education, and for the better. This article offers a counterpoint to the techno-deterministic and optimistic buzz surrounding for-profit MOOCs by contextualizing and analyzing…

In this paper, the author maps three radically different visions of Marxism in educational philosophy. Each "register" contains insights but also contradictions that cannot easily be resolved through internal modifications of the theory or through theoretical synthesis with other registers. The radical function of Marxist pedagogy is to create a…

In this essay Malott makes a case for a Marxist reading of education's role in expanding and reproducing capitalist societies. In the process he challenges the proposition that cognitive capitalism has fundamentally transformed the way in which capitalism operates. That is, rather than being guided by an internal capitalist logic, proponents of…

In the May 2011 edition of this journal, Curry Malott contributed an essay review of Jean Anyon's "Marx and Education" (2011). The author would summarize Mallot's critiques of her book as follows: (1) she didn't write the book that he wanted her to write; (2) she didn't cite the authors that he wanted her to cite; and (3) her work is anti-Marxist…

I explore theoretical conceptions of the use and exchange values of mathematics education within cultural-historical activity theory perspectives. The case of education in England is compared with that of health care (due to Engestrom). Then I draw on Lave and McDermott's study of estranged learning from the early Marx, and from Marx's later…

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In "Difference and Repetition", he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in "Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II" that were co-written with Felix Guattari (1984, 1988)…

This article is intended to appraise the insights gained from Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education. It is particularly interested in CRT's relationship with Marxist discourse, which falls under two questions. One, how does CRT understand Marxist concepts, such as "capital," which show up in the way CRT appropriates them? The article argues that…

Michael Apple's "Ideology and Curriculum", published in 1979, helped initiate a broad turn in the field of education in the United States to Marxist thought as a lens through which to analyze the relationship between school and society. This classic text continues to inform scholarship in the field. While "Ideology" has…

The article offers a conversation with the ghost of the madman "Jacotot/Ranciere": one of the possible dialogues between the ignorant schoolmaster and my own perplexities in what I feel to be an endgame. Is there any point at the present time, in the declining mercantilist university, in pondering once again the issue of the place of philosophy in…

This essay offers an educational understanding of truth deriving from the work of Jacques Ranciere. Unlike other educational accounts--the traditional, progressive, and critical accounts--of truth that take education as a way of approaching pre-existing truths (or lack of pre-existing truths), this essay establishes an account of truth that is…

As critical pedagogy becomes more mainstream on the educational landscape in the United States, it is important to revisit the original tenets of critical pedagogy and explore their current manifestations. Since the beginning of "criticalism" from the theoretical/foundational work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory,…

This paper brings together two ongoing research projects on current citizenship learning programs in Iraq and the United States, both of which draw from the theoretical ground of Marxist-feminist perspective. A particular strength of this paper is its comparison between two American citizenship education programs in the context of neoliberalism,…

In this article, the author seeks to examine the effects of neoliberalism on curricula in Mozambique. Despite the fact that the introduction of neoliberal policies in Mozambique has affected the whole system of education, the focus in this article is only on curriculum reforms in secondary and technical/vocational education. The description and…

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice.…

In this article, the authors explore the multiple roles that contingent faculty play in an evolving system of higher education. They consider the professional work of faculty in contingent positions at Colorado State University through the lens of activity theory, analyzing workplace discourse logs in an effort to understand the roles of…