Read e-book online Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of PDF

In big apple urban in 2009, a brand new form of public tuition opened its doorways to its inaugural classification of heart schoolers. Conceived through a crew of online game designers and revolutionary academic reformers and subsidized by way of favorite philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the study room for the electronic age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the lifetime of the college from its making plans phases to the commencement of its first eighth-grade type. Disruptive Fixation is his account of the way this "school for electronic kids," heralded as a version of tech-driven academic reform, reverted to a extra traditional kind of education with rote studying, an emphasis on self-discipline, and standard hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized classification divisions additionally emerged.

Sims indicates how the philanthropic chances of new media applied sciences are time and again idealized even supposing genuine interventions generally fall in need of the specified outcomes—often dramatically so. He lines the advanced methods in which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and at last stabilizes in ways in which remake and expand a few of the social predicaments reformers desire to mend. Sims bargains a nuanced examine the jobs that strong elites, specialists, the media, and the meant beneficiaries of reform—in this example, the scholars and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle.

Disruptive Fixation deals a well timed exam of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to handle, revealing what failed interventions do be capable of accomplish—and for whom.