Urban Education Dystopia, 2050

Abstract

The definition and history of "urban education" are rooted in the North American and British industrial city of the past two centuries. Common curriculum, public education, and universal access have been the principled responses of democratic societies to the social and cultural conditions of urbanization. In Chicago, Dewey's project was very closely affiliated with Progressive Era politics around the social inequities, corruption and class politics of the American city (Knight, 2005). In Boston, G. Stanley Hall's initial descriptions of adolescence were a response to the emergent problem of urban youth. The industrial city, literally, brought new kinds of educational subjects into existence, developing theories, practices and interventions to address their perceived problems and needs. This Handbook documents new forces of economic and technological change, cultural and linguistic diversity and socio-demographic stratification that are bringing many of the industrial paradigms of urban schooling to a breaking point. In emergent economies and postcolonial conditions of Asia, the Americas and Africa, urban education continues to entail the building of systems of compulsory and universal access to schooling, the expansion of provision for youth and the amelioration of adult and family poverty, and the making of complex national and regional curriculum settlements across cultures and systems. In the post-industrial North and West, policy remains focused on the extension of neoliberal market economics to education, with forces of deregulation, performance-based management and affiliated educational foci on testing and curriculum regulation.