If you are looking for a book to expand your ideas about education beyond hackneyed discussions of NCLB and longer school days, then Kincheloe's RETHINKING INTELLIGENCE is a great choice. The essays in this collection are effective for the following reasons: 1) they uncover assumptions about education; 2) they highlight the cultural dynamics at work in the construction of educational theory; and 3) they point to practices, such as the "validation" of certain types of knowledge and modes of presentation, and the ways these practices serve some students and disserve others.
Most notable in this collection is Suzanne Gallagher's "An Exchange of Gazes." In this essay, Gallagher engages in a Foucauldian analysis of our system of teacher education with a focus on educational psychology. Gallagher skillfully uncovers the "taken-for-granted" ways of thinking in our current system. She points out that scientists are behind these theories, and that these scientists are people with "ideological, political, and cultural biases." Questions about education, Gallagher asserts, are engineered from specific socio-political locations. These questions are then recast as "objective" inquiry. As Gallagher aptly states, "[E]ducational psychologist seem to forget that they do not discover but invent the knowledge they apply."
"[T]he educational apparatus still marches to its drummer," Philip Wexler writes, "without any knowledge or embarrassment of the small place of this particular discourse in the historical human drama." Wexler's introduction serves as an apropos opening to this collection of essays, a collection which uses "post-formal thought" to subvert the "domination of education by cognitive psychology." Reader beware: Rethinking is a academic text. As such, it relies heavily on post-positive and post-modernist jargon. Rethinking is Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison meets Delpit's Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Updated Edition, with a pinch of Illich's Deschooling Society (Open Forum).
The essays in Rethinking go beyond bandaging inequality and "achievement gaps" with budget and policy proposals. These essays work like holistic medicine. They analyze the entire system of educational psychology and then ferret out the cause of our current woes.
