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Dystopia & Education: Insights into Theory, Praxis, and Policy in an Age of Utopia-Gone-Wrong By Jessica A. Heybach and Eric C. Sheffield (Eds.) Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing (2013). 298 pp., $39.09 _____________________________________________________________________________________
Reviewed by Courtney Smith-Nelson, Missouri State University
Abstract Jessica A Heybach and Eric C. Sheffield’s Dystopia & Education is a collection of essays that examine the plight of modern-day public education through the lens of dystopian themes in literature, movies, and other media. The essays converge on one overarching theme: American schooling in the 21st century—and the young people being subjected to it—is in trouble, trouble which has been predicted or mirrored to a disturbing degree of accuracy in dystopian works of the last two centuries. This review dissects the book section by section and discusses its implications for the current generation of “dystopian youth” students. Keywords: Book review, Dystopian themes, Educational philosophy, Educational reform, Dystopia and school, Dystopian youth It is an arguable truth that pop culture historically has been overlooked in academia. For better or worse, the ideas, perspectives, and memes of mainstream America have been, until relatively recently, relegated to a separate sphere from “high” culture—ivory tower literature, philosophy, and the like. From the founding of the Popular Culture Association in the 1970s to the evergrowing Pop Culture and Philosophy book series, the scholarly critique of popular culture and its reflection of/on society has become a more widely accepted (or at the very least, more widely published) field of study. In that vein, Heybach and Sheffield’s Dystopia & Education is a collection of essays that examines the plight of modern-day public education through the lens of dystopian themes in literature, movies, and video games. The authors of these essays come from a wide range of backgrounds, but converge on one overarching theme: American schooling and education in the 21st century—and the young people being subjected to it—are in trouble, trouble which has been predicted or mirrored to a disturbing degree of accuracy in dystopian works of the last two centuries. Dystopia & Education is broken up into the three sections listed in its subtitle: theory, praxis, and policy, with the editors’ acknowledgment that any one cannot be separated from the others entirely; to that end, many of the works present address a combination of the three themes. Whether intentionally or not, these sections also appear in ascending order of readability and accessibility for the layperson whose expertise may not include the philosophy of education.