" Educating the Posthuman is an exciting and refreshing book. This
book is unique and unusual. Weaver explores the intersections
between literature, biosciences and curriculum theory.
Understanding the posthuman best happens when scholars explore
these three interrelated areas of study."
"From Frankenstein to Einstein, Weaver creates a fascinating text
that all educators, literary scholars and scientists should read.
From the problematics of pharmaceuticals to the promise of
scholarly debate, this text dazzles. Weaver argues that the
scientific issues of our day are best understood through the study
of fiction. What does fiction teach that science does not? Are
scientists blind to their own conundrums? Certainly colleges of
education and public schools—Weaver claims—are bottomless
conundrums."
"One of the most troubling and fascinating claims that Weaver makes
is that curriculum scholars should leave colleges of education and
find their homes elsewhere. Colleges of education—at least in the
United States—have become unthinking, rule-bound, accrediting
nightmares. Weaver says that colleges of education as well as
public schools are worse than nightmares because at least at the
end of a nightmare we wake up. But now, in colleges of education
and in public schools, the nightmare goes on and on without
reprieve."
"Clearly educating (the posthuman) is not happening in either
colleges of education or public schools. What is happening is that
professors of education and teachers as well as students are being
miseducated to think that all that matters are instrumental
outcomes and getting a paycheck. As if education has anything to do
with getting a paycheck!!"
"Weaver weaves these disturbing and exciting thoughts together in a
most imaginative way. This book is a must read for students,
teachers, professors and everyone who grapples with what is post
about the human. "
—Marla Morris, Associate Professor of Education, Georgia Southern
University
"The notion that Colleges of Education and public education train
their students to chase monsters is nothing new. The fact that
these monsters are the power of a liberal arts education,
democratic thinking in the Deweyan sense, and dreams of public
service and public good tells us that things are horribly wrong.
Drugged physically, morally and intellectually schools are
producing sharp self-medicators who function in our society based
on their lessons learned. The life of the mind has been replaced by
the desolate future we see in the Terminator movies."
"At one time the liberal arts and physical sciences were housed in
the same units. Colleges of education also once followed such a
model. Now we find the liberal arts reeling and their influence on
our thought diminished. John Weaver’s idea of curriculum studies
following the liberal arts is not one to be discarded lightly.
There is no room in colleges of education for the undrugged mind to
find a home. When preservice and inservice students tell me they
used to like to read, then I know we’re doing the same thing to our
own literacy identities that we are doing to children."
"Weaver’s book is more than a wakeup call to public education and
those places that train teachers to work in schools; it is a cogent
argument that reminds us of what our potential once was and may yet
be again. Like Murphy, in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, those
clear moments of who we were become quickly obscured by Nurse
Ratchett’s approaching footsteps. "
—Michael Moore, Editor, English Education
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