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This chapter explores how ‘utopian progressive’ and ‘non-utopian progressive’, or ‘child-centred’, educationalists developed two fundamentally opposed sets of ideas about the capabilities, development and potential of children. Having demonstrated that utopian progressivism had relatively little impact on mainstream educationalists and on the significant series of inter-war reports produced by the Board of Education, the chapter defines what practices and ideas were signified by a ‘child-centred’ education before 1945. The simultaneous commitment to providing an ‘individual’ and a ‘natural’ education for children introduced an inherent tension into this pedagogical programme. However, this tension was largely dormant during the inter-war period itself, as early child-centred experiments such as the Malting House School dealt with small groups of children, and so were able to provide a genuinely individualised education. Citizenship, a key goal for child-centred educationalists, was also conceived of in more individualistic terms in the 1920s and 1930s than after the advent of a collectivistic welfare state in the 1940s.

Using household income to measure income inequality and define poverty has many flaws. Comparing individuals and households of the same age cohort is far more likely to be meaningful, because it is comparing households with their peers who are at the same stage of their life cycle, have grown up in the same era, and have the same vintage of schooling. Age is the better choice for anchoring the poverty line, not household size.

The chapter introduces readers to a class of 13 to 14-year-old in an average London school. Through our ethnographic case study, we present the rationale for the study and key theoretical frameworks. We explore the public’s concerns and anxieties around teaching, learning, family life, peer friendships, digital culture, social networks and social change. Key theoretical frames around globalisation, individualisation and the role of digital media as well as arguments around the risk society, individualisation are discussed. It is argued that families in the digital age are adopting strategies that are conservative, connected or competitive, in ways that the book will explain. The chapter explains the outline of the book’s argument and provides a pithy chapter by chapter breakdown.

Our final chapter develops normative concerns, to ask what can be said about the prospects for connected living and learning in the digital age. Our portrait of young people’s lives is in many senses a heartening one—they are generally sensible, thoughtful, and optimistic; doing reasonably well at school; largely happy at home; and having fun with friends. Encouragingly, we find rather little evidence of the competitive individualism that critics of neoliberalism fear, although we do show how the school especially seeks to instill competition into school life. We find more evidence of an adherence to conservative structures and comfortable pleasures. Is this, inadvertently, sacrificing the potential for radical alternatives that could undermine the seeming straitjacket of social reproduction, reconfigure pedagogic possibilities, and open up more diverse connections and pathways to opportunity? We conclude with some futuristic thinking about how parents, teachers, governments and media organizations could help to build better futures for today’s children and young people.

This chapter explores some of the key issues associated with diversity and schooling in eleven countries in Asia: the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), plus the People’s Republic of China (China). Some of the complex issues which are examined include cultural identity, assimilation or inclusion, choice of language, preferred culture, equality and power relations — all of which contribute to the provision of quality education in Asian countries. A broad, rather than an exclusively Chinese, perspective is adopted because Chinese people are found in all of these countries and because these countries are often, erroneously, perceived to be similar, a misconception this chapter attempts to dispel.

Education has many institutional dimensions, and diverse social control issues can arise in a variety of settings. This chapter concentrates primarily on schooling for children in England, within what has generally been thought of as the state sector, and makes reference to disadvantaged pupils in particular. We begin with a brief note on the historical development and 'construction' of schooling. This is followed by discussions of approaches under New Labour and the UK Coalition government. The chapter then concludes with a local example from northern England, suggesting that there might be viable alternatives to 'top-down' discipline-orientated strategies as far as disadvantaged households and localities are concerned.

Chapter 5 chiefly focuses on how young Muslims come to learn about Islam. It examines what the processes and institutions are for shaping their Islamic knowledge and influencing their practices. This chapter also looks into how the adolescents manage to learn about their prayers at home, read the Qur’an at the mosque as well as acquire religious know-how through schooling.

Once aware of the possibility of relocation, the Maroons launched a determined campaign to leave Halifax. They refused to work and threatened to punish other Maroons who conceded to Nova Scotians’ demands. They sent petitions to Parliament. Unable to force a military community to convert to handymen-laborers, Nova Scotia’s government made arrangements for them to permanently leave the colony. The British government subsidized the Maroons’ relocation to Sierra Leone. The military-trained Maroons were viewed as potential colonizers, collaborators in British claims to West Africa.

Chapter One examines the Zion School District from the district, or central office, level. Within the district, central office leaders claimed equity as a priority but simultaneously claimed that the responsibility for failed attempts at equity resided in individual schools. When there existed a convergence of interests, some progress was made around diversity, but this progress was always narrowly defined and limited by the possessive investment in whiteness. When no such interests converged, responsibility for equity was consistently displaced elsewhere.

Chapter Two examines the ways teachers at Birch and Spruce understood and engaged multicultural education as either “powerblind sameness” or “colorblind difference.” Although these framing concepts appear to be logically inconsistent with one another, educators ascribed to both simultaneously. These two frameworks of sameness and difference serve as a dual system of support for whiteness.

Chapter Three discusses some of the meaningful silences around–and silencing of–race and sexuality in schools. Even though done with the best of intentions, efforts at maintaining politeness end up maintaining the status quo rather than facilitating social change.

Chapter Four highlights how schools differently engage diversity and, specifically, the notion of equality. At Spruce, a powerblind, colorblind understanding of equality shaped the ways educators understood excellence and the efforts they made to provide a high quality education to Spruce students. At Birch, however, educators engaged a more race- and power-conscious form of equality, but they were so constrained by the pressures of standardized accountability, that their diversity-related efforts were also limited and ultimately failed to approximate what was needed to advance equity..

Chapter Five examines current federal efforts to “turnaround the nation’s worst schools” through targeted School Improvement Grants. With a foundation in individualism and classical liberalism, this school-reform model results in the loss of students, teachers, and actual schools. The resulting neoliberal transformation exacerbates inequity and reifies whiteness.

The concluding chapter suggests that while whiteness shapes what diversity-related policy and practice look like, the resulting policy and practice, in turn, further strengthen whiteness. Thus, whiteness operates as an almost perfect system. It is effective and efficient at what it does. As a key element of whiteness in schools, niceness makes equity very difficult, so we must be awake, vigilant, and strategic.

The Introduction begins with a succinct factual account of Wilde’s classical ‘biography’, from his childhood and early schooling, through his years as a student at Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, to his later literary success. It explains the novelty of, and the cause for, the broad interdisciplinary approach taken in this book, and argues that the contributed essays, dealing in multifaceted but complementary ways, add significantly to modern Wildean scholarship. The Introduction is intended as a guide to the themes covered in this collection and the links which unite them in their mission. It argues that Wilde’s classicism was crucial to his self-creation, to his taking control of his own myth, and that one of the most striking aspects of his classicism was his commoditization of the ancient world, his use of it in literary ‘products’ designed to be consumed by large middle-class audiences.

The chapter continues to study the securityscapes of Uzbeks in Osh following the violence of 2010. Its emphasis is on how certain imaginations of the future influence the construction of everyday securityscapes. In particular, the chapter concentrates on the schooling practices of Uzbek parents, that is to say, on their decisions concerning the kind of kindergartens, schools and universities to which they send their children. It finds that many Uzbek parents want their offspring to be educated in such a way that they are able to speak Russian without an accent. Not only would this help them to conceal their Uzbek identity. It also speaks to the imagination of a more secure future outside of Kyrgyzstan.