Benign Violence
Subtitle: Education in and Beyond the Age of Reason
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan - https://www.palgrave.com/gp/is-changing#c19645868
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Format: eBook
ISBN-13: 9781137272867
Description: Education is a violent act, yet this violence is concealed by its good intent. Education presents itself as a distinctly improving, enabling practice. Even its most radical critics assume that education is, at core, an incontestable social good.

Setting education in its political context, this book, now in paperback, offers a history of good intentions, ranging from the birth of modern schooling and modern examination, to the rise (and fall) of meritocracy. In challenging all that is well-intentioned in education, it reveals how our educational commitments are always underwritten by violence. Our highest ideals have the lowest origins.

Seeking to unsettle a settled conscience, Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason is designed to disturb the reader. Education constitutes us as subjects; we owe our existence to its violent inscriptions. Those who refuse or rebel against our educational present must begin by objecting to the subjects we have become.
Notes: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137272867
Table of contents: title: Contents; title: List of Figures viii; title: Acknowledgements ix; title: Preface x; title: I Bodies; title: On Progress 1; title: Modern Examination 10; title: Educated Bodies 21; title: A Child’s Interior 40; title: II Populations; title: On Forgetting 53; title: The Violence of Power 58; title: Make Live and Let Die 85; title: Improving the Breed 97; title: III Meritocracies; title: Our Eugenic Religion 132; title: The Occasional Hero 146; title: Lives Redistributed 167; title: After Fairness 206; title: Notes 251; title: Index 287