The Morality of Mass Formal Schooling Systems: Education, Rights, and Resistance

This book delves into a novel philosophical and moral analysis of the mass formal schooling system. In the light of the routine and unjust systemic harm to primary- and secondary-aged children caused by the mass formal schooling system, the book acknowledges the need for making efforts towards nonharmful educational alternatives.

The book undertakes a rights-based and harm-rejecting critique of the mass formal schooling system, placing its ideologies and practices under the microscope. The volume proposes that students have a right to defend themselves, and that others have an obligation to defend them and work towards systems and educational practices rooted in peace and non-harm. Chapters discuss themes such as self-defence, student resistance, and educational vanguardism. Peace education movements and frameworks are considered in a discussion on the development and viability of alternative pedagogical approaches. In examining how the mass schooling system has established itself as the only viable conception of education making it difficult to imagine the alternatives, the book urges a new re-imagining of what education means.

This book is of relevance to researchers of philosophy of education and education studies, academics, postgraduates and scholars of education, and anyone who is interested in a moral analysis of the dominant education system of our time.