pay attention the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was once born out of running a blog as an act of social justice. Over a interval of approximately years, many posts outfitted the case opposed to market-based schooling reform and for a severe re-imagining of public schooling. This publication offers a coordinated sequence of essays in accordance with that paintings, utilizing a variety of written and visible texts to name for the common public schooling now we have did not achieve.

The valuable photograph and caution of the book—“beware the roadbuilders”—is drawn from Alice Walker’s the colour red. The ebook provides a compelling argument that billionaires, politicians, and self-professed schooling reformers are doing extra damage than good—despite their public messages. the general public and our scholars are being overwhelmed underneath their reforms.

In the wake of Ferguson and the growing to be checklist of sacrificed younger black men—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—the essays during this publication achieve an excellent wider resonance, trying to research either the bigger international of inequity in addition to the continuing failure of academic inequity. whereas every one bankruptcy stands as a separate examining, the booklet as a complete produces a cohesive subject and argument in regards to the strength of severe literacy to learn and re-read the realm, and to write down and re-rewrite the area (Paulo Freire).

Supporting that better message are a number of key principles and questions: What are the confrontational texts we should always be inviting scholars to learn, that anybody may still learn? rather than lowering texts to the slender expectancies of recent feedback or “close reading,” how will we extend these texts into how they tell dwelling in a loose society and interesting in activism? How do conventional assumptions approximately what texts subject and what texts show aid the established order of strength? and the way can texts of every kind help in the continuing pursuit of fairness between loose people?