This collection of original essays examines the complex relationship between schooling and society.

This collection of original essays examines the complex relationship between schooling and society. By taking a critical approach, the text urges readers to formulate difficult questions about the practice of teaching and the experience of schooling. The text also illustrates the multiple forces that come into play for both educators and for students, and challenges the reductive and pragmatic approach adopted in conventional education courses.

Introduction
SECTION ONE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
1. New Institutional Theory and the Weberian Tradition
2. Feminist Approaches to the Sociology of Education in Canada
3. Assessing Pierre Bourdieu's Theoretical Legacies for Feminist Sociology of Education: Culture, Self, and Society
4. Theorizing Anti-Racism
5. Multicultural, Anti-Racist Education, and Black Feminist Pedagogy
6. The Stranger Side of Education: A Dialogue with Psychoanalysis
SECTION TWO: PROCESS AND EQUITY
7. Streaming In/For the New Economy
8. School Rules, Bodily Discipline, Embodied Resistance
9. African Canadian Students, Identity, and Diaspora Literacy
10. Rethinking Culture Theory in Aboriginal Education
11. Addressing Homophobia and Heterosexism for all Children in Canadian Schools: A Responsibility of Educational Leaders
12. Class Encounters: Working Class Students at University
13. 'The Future is Female': Mapping Postmodernist Panics over Failing Boys and Over-Successful Girls in the UK and Canada
14. The Road to School Leads Out of Town: Rurality and Schooling in Atlantic Canada
SECTION THREE: REFORMS AND CONSEQUENCES
15. Education Governance in Canada, 1900-2003: Trends and Significance
16. British Columbia: Whose Education? What Reform?
17. Painting the Mountain Green: Discourses of Accountability and Critical Practice
18. The Assault of Neo-Liberalism on Education Reform, Restructuring, and Teaching in Ontario Secondary Schools
19. Race, Parents, and the Organization of Education Policy Discourse in Ontario
20. Public Schooling, Public Knowledge, and the Education of Public School Teachers
21. The Privatization of Higher Education in Canada