Praise for Critical Curriculum Studies:
“If Wayne Au wanted to ‘revitalize’ curriculum studies—it worked! Articulating the complex simply, this unique and insightful contribution successfully explains the electric relationship between what we learn and what we do. This is a must read for those interested in knowledge and possibility.” —William H. Watkins, Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago
“This is an essential book for anyone interested in the politics of knowledge and education that aims to be transformative rather than reproductive of current social conditions. Summing Up: Essential.” —E. W. Ross, University of British Columbia, in CHOICE
In A Marxist Education: Learning to Change the World, professor and education activist Wayne Au traces his own development as a Marxist educator, as well as the development of Marxist educational theory. Arguing that dialectical materialism is at the heart of Marxist theory, Au uses dialectics to not only analyze the relationship between capitalism and schools, but also to understand teaching, learning, and curriculum.
A Marxist Education challenges the idea that Marxism is Eurocentric, reclaims noted educators such as Lev Vygotsky and Paulo Freire as part of the socialist tradition, and integrates anti-racist and feminist struggle into an analyses of education, consciousness, and power.
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"In A Marxist Education, Wayne Au reveals the method he has applied for years to understand structures of education that have made him one of the most insightful voices nationally in the struggle for education justice. Au boldly illustrates to educators and activists how Marxism is a dynamic tool for resisting the ways schooling has been used to reproduce racism and oppression."
--Jesse Hagopian, author of More Than a Score
"Shattering myths and misconceptions about Marxism in every chapter, Wayne Au shows how Marx’s method has guided his pathbreaking research on the racial politics of education policy and his work as an activist and organizer for educational justice."
--Brian Jones, Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
"Au’s purpose is to upend the dogma of common sense, to analyze the educational catastrophe before us and the seeds of the struggles we will need to mount in order to imagine and then enact just schools; his method is dialectical-materialism; his insights are profound and plentiful. The result is an essential book for these times, a weapon to carry to the next school board meeting, the picket line, or the barricades."
--Bill Ayers is the author of Demand the Impossible and Teaching Toward Freedom
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