When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto

"As Michelle Alexander points out, “Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, they are feeding our prisons.”"

"They exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Trust, imagination, creativity, and a respect for critical teaching and learning are thrown to the wind in the pursuit of profits and the proliferation of rigid, death-dealing accountability schemes."

"Instead of learning to become independent thinkers, they acquire the debilitating habits of what might be called a moral and political deficit disorder that renders them passive and obedient in the face of a society based on massive inequalities in power, wealth and income. "

"The only language they know is the discourse of profit and the disciplinary language of command."