The Messianic and the Mundane [Book Review]

Here are two very different books about schooling. Bob Connell, in messianic mode, targets ruling-class hegemony and its expression in education. His politics is radical, his intellectual project conservative. In the second Institute for Cultural Policy Studies collection on education this radical/conservative axis is reversed. The eleven ICPS authors break new historical ground, but are almost at peace with government; one of the main targets of their cautious and calculating analysis is left-wing politics in education. These two books cover much of schooling between them, but, in a sign of the times, each excludes the concerns of the other. Review(s) of: Schools and Social Justice, by R.W. Connell, (Pluto, Sydney, 1993), $16.95 pb, Review(s) of: Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity, Denise Meredyth and Deborah Tyler (eds), (Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University, 1993), $25.00 pb. Includes footnotes.