Smoke and Mirrors
Subtitle: The Hidden Context of Violence in Schools and Society
By: Edited by Stephanie Urso Spina
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: September 2000
Place of publication: USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 280
ISBN-13: 9780847695614
Copyright date: 2000
Subjects: Children; Violence in society; Philosophy & Social Aspects; Education; Education / Teaching; Youth; USA; Prevention; Behavior Management; Criminology; Non-Classifiable; General; Crimes against; Students; United States
Description: The strength of Smoke and Mirrors lies in the multiple discourses about violence that it draws on to show the complicated ways in which violence is produced, deployed, consumed, and reproduced. The lively debates between and within chapters elucidate the role of violence in the lives of America’s youth and expose the ways in which the overarching system of violence emerges in a variety of forms, including physical aggression, scientific knowledge, alienation, anomie, and social policies.  Collectively, the chapters help us think and act toward social and educational reform, and ultimately toward social justice.
Henry Giroux argues that young people are in crisis because they have been eliminated from democratic processes. Donna Gaines shows that high school dropouts in Bergenfield, New Jersey were driven to suicide because they felt isolated and disconnected from their communities. Jessie Klein and Lynn Chaucer write that high-profile school shootings by boys are the last resort for asserting their masculinity in a country where violence is accepted, and even sometimes glorified, as a masculine trait. Paolo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, along with Stephanie Urso Spina, posit that systemic violence is imposed on children through the scientific and psychological processes that label, sort, stereotype and categorize them, resulting in the alienation of many young people from both school and society. 
If alienation and marginalization are important factors in violence among youth, then the solution is to create communities that support and connect young people. Several contributors address this issue.  Charles “Paco” Hernandez, a former gang member, provides an alternative look at gangs as avenues for intervention, while Jennifer Obidah suggests talking with children who experience violence every day as a way of finding solutions towards eradicating violence in their lives. However, creating new communities is not an easy task since, as Spina, Stanley Aronowitz, Peter McLaren, Zeus Leonardo, and Ricky Lee Allen all show, violence is embedded in American society, in its history, discourse, and global policies.
The contributions to Smoke and Mirrors provoke readers to think about how violence suffuses the lives of youth, beyond just the obvious physical acts of violence, since even the physical acts of violence generally manifest more insidious and fundamental ills in society. In fact, the “smoke” in the title is violence itself, and this smoke indicates but also obscures its sources. The desire to show how American society engages in violence at multiple levels has resulted in a collection that contains a range of styles and foci, from highly theoretical essays to qualitative studies to journalistic pieces, which together reveal the extraordinarily broad scope of violence in American schools and society. 
The strength of Smoke and Mirrors lies in the multiple discourses about violence that it draws on to show the complicated ways in which violence is produced, deployed, consumed, and reproduced. The lively debates between and within chapters elucidate the role of violence in the lives of America’s youth and expose the ways in which the overarching system of violence emerges in a variety of forms, including physical aggression, scientific knowledge, alienation, anomie, and social policies.  Collectively, the chapters help us think and act toward social and educational reform, and ultimately toward social justice.