Overview

The past decade has seen a vast expansion of resilience pedagogies, policies, and products in public education, from the Every Student Succeeds Act to social and emotional learning to grit. Educational apps, avatars, and games as well as behaviorist techniques, meditation programs, and biometric devices claim to teach resilience to adverse social conditions while new cyber schools, education brokers, global democracy promotion companies, and dropout recovery firms promise schools resilience to disaster and disruption. The Disaster of Resilience shows how resilience discourse is interwoven with the new digital directions of educational privatization. Saltman argues that resilience has provided the justification for new educational profiteering, creating a climate which individualizes collective responsibilities, depoliticizes and dehistoricizes knowledge and curriculum, and falsely grounds its politics in a mashup of pseudoscience and human capital theory. He argues that we must replace resilience discourse with pedagogies and curriculum that allow students not only to endure the intolerable conditions they find themselves in, but to see beyond those conditions and to act collectively on the social, economic, and racial injustices that created them.

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9781350342415

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Teachers, students and parents are required to be excitedly resilient in the face of radical reforms that are destroying their relationship with each other in schools and communities. Saltman shows in detail the relationship between seemingly benign interventions about bodies and practices, and the unfolding disasters occurring as a result of the relocation of responsibility to the private world of the individual. This book is shockingly important for understanding and explaining the dismantling of public education. -- Helen M. Gunter, Professor Emerita, University of Manchester, UK If you’re excited about promoting resilience among the youth, read this book. Educators, parents, students, and researchers all need to consider what Saltman unveils. Resilience pedagogy, no matter what its form, may just be that trojan horse for even more privatization, and even less democracy. -- Mark Garrison, Professor of Education, West Texas A&M University, USA

Author Information

Kenneth J. Saltman is Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, USA. He is the author of The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers (2022), The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance (2018) and The Politics of Education, 2nd edition (2018). He is a fellow of the National Educational Policy Center and a Fulbright Chair in Globalization and Culture.

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