Description
Book SynopsisAs Junk Bond felon Michael Milken attempts to transform public education on the model of the HMO, he is hailed in the mainstream press as having done more to help mankind than Mother Theresa. Even as BP Amoco, a notorious U.S. polluter, is charged with funding and arming paramilitaries in Colombia, it freely distributes science curricula that portrays itself as a loving protector of citizens from a dangerous and ''out of control'' nature. These as well as many other examples abound as Professors Robin Truth Goodman and Kenneth J. Saltman take on the corporate educators, media monopolies, and oil companies in their new book Strange Love: How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market. Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so Goodman and Saltman reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy.
Trade Review'You are either with us or against us!' is a popular proclamation these days, one largely without an explanation of who actually profits from neo-liberal symbolic, cultural, and economic agendas. Strange Love: How We Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Market takes the issue of 'us' head on. Courageously, Truth Goodman and Saltman reveal how neo-liberal markets cannot solve what they in fact create, and that the possibilities of 'us' in any real participatory democracy requires consciousness and not coercion. -- Pepi Leistyna, author, Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception and Defining and Designing Multiculturalism
Strange Love provides a remarkable multidisciplinary breadth and depth of documentary research and charts important new investigative and humanistic territory. It will be of value to faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in further research on educational corporatization and globalization, especially within humanistic, aesthetic, ethical, and cultural traditions. * Teachers College Record *
Goodman and Saltman provide here a carefully researched piece of work. Part film criticism, part popular culture, part social commentary, part sociology, the book centers on the corporatization of education and how it is the principle means through which globalization is achieved. * CHOICE *
The authors provide a remarkable multidisciplinary breadth and depth of documentary research. Strange Love charts important new investigative and humanistic territory among related works. It will be of value to faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in further research on educational corporization and globalization, especially within humanistic, aesthetic, ethical, and cultural traditions. * Teachers College Record *
Part educational theory, part cultural studies, part investigative journalism, this book judges the results of innovative corporate initiatives in public education such as Knowledge Universe, Amoco's iMPACT, the Pegasus Prize, as well as the educational impact of some recent films. Strange Love is a thoroughly researched and important book. -- Alphonso Lingis, author, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
Table of Contents1 Introduction 2 Junk King Education 3 Rivers of Fire: Amoco's iMPACT on Education 4 A Time For Flying Horses: Oil Education and the Future of Literature 5 The Mayor's Madness: So Far from God 6 Enemy of the State 7 A Hilarious Romp throught the Holocaust 8 Conclusion Chapter 9 Coda Chapter 10 Index
