The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education - Softcover

Churchill, Christian J.; Levy, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439907846 ISBN 13: 9781439907849

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2011

Synopsis

The Enigmatic Academy is a provocative look at the purpose and practice of education in America. Authors Christian Churchill and Gerald Levy use three case studies - a liberal arts college, a boarding school, and a Job Corps centre - to illustrate how class, bureaucratic, and secular-religious dimensions of education prepare youth for participation in American foreign and domestic policy at all levels. The authors describe how schools contribute to the formation of a bureaucratic character; how middle and upper class students are trained for leadership positions in corporations, government, and the military; and how the education of lower class students often serves more powerful classes and institutions. Exploring how youth and their educators encounter the complexities of ideology and bureaucracy in school, The Enigmatic Academy deepens our understanding of the flawed redemptive relationship between education and society in the United States. Paradoxically, these three studied schools all prepare students to participate in a society whose values they oppose. Christian J. Churchill is Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College, author of numerous articles in sociology, and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan. Gerald E. Levy is a sociologist and author of Ghetto School: Class Warfare in an Elementary School. He taught at the college level for forty years and is now retired.

About this title

Review:

"[T]he cases are insightful and comprehensive ethnographies that offhandedly integrate aspects of academics - student life and student support, marketing, recruitment, retention, community relations and government policies - they are engaging and thought-provoking from many enrollment management/student services perspectives... [The authors'] observations are intense and insightful." Strategic Enrollment Management Source "Their research method is ethnographic case studies of three kinds of schools (for which the book is organized into three parts)... Each part ends with a conclusion that is a superb summary of the previous analysis, and the summaries will make the blood of readers concerned with social justice boil... Summing Up: Recommended."--Choice, February 2013

About the Author:

Christian J. Churchill is Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College, author of numerous articles in sociology, and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan. Gerald E. Levy is a sociologist and author of Ghetto School: Class Warfare in an Elementary School. He taught at the college level for forty years and is now retired.

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1439907846
• ISBN 13: 9781439907849
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234