Cultural Miseducation

In this engaging and accessible volume, Jane Roland Martin develops a brilliantly innovative approach to education that illuminates one of the most pressing issues of our day—the passing down of “cultural liabilities,” such as violence in the home, school, and world at large and hatred of other races, religions, genders, ethnicities, or sexual orientations. By encouraging readers to look at education from the standpoint of culture, new questions emerge: How is a culture’s wealth to be defined? Who is qualified to contribute to it? How can we preserve a culture’s assets for the next generation?

Cultural Miseducation:

• Constructs a new framework for viewing education, school, and curriculum.
• Develops more inclusive, democratic definitions of culture and citizenship.
• Expands the concept of educational agency to include all groups and institutions in our society.
• Covers such important issues as a national curriculum, violence in the media, hate speech, censorship, and standardized testing.

Jane Roland Martin is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

“Jane Roland Martin addresses one of the most important questions facing any culture, made critical today by the surge in the ubiquitous educating that surrounds us….Her answers are a wake-up call for everyone, not just educators.”
— John Goodlad, President, Institute for Educational Inquiry

"Jane Martin gives us the single most important key to improving education: excitement about how to do it. She shows us ways to pass on the new cultural abundance, divorce difference from inequality, replace the private property model of learning with the gift model, and trade isolated students for knowledge-sharing citizens. In the midst of despair about schools, she creates ideas and hope."
— Gloria Steinem

“How can cultures preserve and transmit their cultural assets but not their cultural liabilities? Martin's "cultural wealth" approach to this question succeeds where Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, and contemporary critics and reformers of education could not. Martin's analysis is thought-provoking and fun to read.”
— Sandra Harding, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA