When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination

If the right‐wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination”, reduced to anti‐ public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory. Market‐driven educational reforms exhibit contempt for teachers and distrust of parents, repress creative teaching, destroy challenging and imaginative programs of study, and treat students as mere inputs on an assembly line. Under pedagogy of repression, students are conditioned to unlearn any respect for democracy, justice, and what it might mean to connect learning to social change. Critical pedagogy is situated within a project that views education as central to creating students who are socially responsible and civically engaged citizens. Critical pedagogy must reject teaching being subordinated to the dictates of standardization, “measurement mania”, and high‐stakes testing. Neoliberalism is a disimagination machine that remakes social identity by turning civic subjects into consuming and marketable subjects.