Deschooling the Imagination Critical Thought as Social Practice

"Deschooling the Imagination: Critical Thought as Social Practice" is, first, a book that looks at what it means to be actively engaged in developing a critical/creative mindset against the prevailing ideology of our public schools. Second, it is a book about the social/cultural relationship between what and how we learn on one hand and our imaginative capacities on the other. Finally, but equally important, it is a book about how teachers can teach in the service of a revived critical/creative imaginary. In short, you may be interested in reading this book if you are curious about examining the following questions in more depth: How can educators and those involved and/or invested in public education in the United States learn to think about curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, school structures, knowledge, power, identity, language/literacy, economics, creativity, human ecology, and our collective future in a way that escapes the over-determined discourses that inform current attitudes and practices of schooling? What are some of the tactics and strategies that teachers, students, parents, administrators, and policymakers can learn and enact in the service of a future that we can barely imagine?

Prologue Part I 1 Introduction 2 Critical Pedagogy and the Crisis of Imagination 3 The Habitus of the Hegemonic Imagination 4 Constructions of Innocence in Times of War: Breaking into the Hegemony of Peace 5 The Story of B. W. Gartenkraut and the Institute of Critical and Creative Thought: What Should Be, Could Be, But Isn’t Part II 6 Instructional Techniques: Critical Thought as Imaginative Practice 7 Conclusion: Liberating the Imagination

Eric J. Weiner is Associate Professor of Education at Montclair State University in New Jersey, as well as an artist and a poet. His work examines the contradictory spaces that form in the intersection of schooling and critical thought.