Petrovic & Kuntz (2018) - Invasion, Alienation, and Imperialist Nostalgia

Petrovic, J., & Kuntz, A. (2018). Invasion, alienation, and imperialist nostalgia: Overcoming the necrophilous nature of neoliberal schools. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 957-969.

How Schools Alienate Students

 * "Competitive grading, we argue, serves as necrophilous instruction in neoliberalism, inferiority, and alienation. This is because grades become a fetish; they are constructed as having intrinsic value, becoming objects of consumption for students and teachers alike." (pp. 963-964)
 * Kohn's (1999) three  effects of grading:  "[1] a reduction in students’ interest in learning, [2] a desire to avoid challenging tasks, and [3] an attenuation of creative thinking." (p. 964)
 * Students ask questions about work requirements (# pages, # examples, # points), taking away from questions about real learning

Unschooling as Solution

 * Unschooling holds up a mirror to traditional schools to lay bare what's taken for granted - "we encourage deeper investigation of unschooling as a model that disrupts traditional schooling to the extent that it challenges traditional practices in a way unbeholden to the dominant ideological commitments of our time." (p. 966)
 * Students choose their interests along principle of negative freedom - adults can't tell them what not to do; but once students are "apprenticed" or choose an interest, then their choice is restricted to help them learn what they've chosen
 * "This, then, suggests a somewhat different model from unschooling in which each child constructs his or her own mental models and parents and other guides learn to respect children and their interests trusting children to learn without having their learning managed for them. This is the democratic free school model which, in many ways, becomes a form of unschooling in school." (p. 967)
 * Unschool has freedom (non-coercion) but also promotion of democracy to develop autonomy