Thoughts Out of School

Counterpoints publishes the most compelling and imaginative books being written in education today. Grounded on the theoretical advances in criticalism, feminism and postmodernism in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Counterpoints engages the meaning of these innovations in various forms of educational expression. Committed to the proposition that theoretical literature should be accessible to a variety of audiences, the series insists that its authors avoid esoteric and jargonistic languages that transform educational scholarship into an elite discourse for the initiated.

Schooling, Ivan Illich says, is one modern manifestation of the «mystery of evil». The essays in Thoughts out of School are observations of what happens to children and teachers-in-training as they go through the peculiarly modern institution of schooling. «Schools are so large in our lives that some of us never escape their reasoning or their practices», Arney writes. But through acute observation and by taking the reader back to the historical roots of commonplace terms like «development» and «character», Arney offers a way to think about schools, on the one hand, and about true education and learning, on the other. Arney’s surgical insights cut through the layers of contemporary eduspeak to reveal the bones of what all good teachers and parents want for their students and their children. Arney’s response to the mystery of evil that is schooling: «If we recognize the hopelessness of our reliance on schools, we might be able to hope for our children and ourselves again.»