Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures

One of the most compelling ethnographies of school ever written, "Schooling as a Ritual Performance" has for over a decade made its mark among educators, sociologists, and those seeking to understand the cultural meaning of classroom practices. Written by one of the major world figures on the educational left, "Schooling as a Ritual Performance" is a pioneering study of the partnership between capitalism and religion and the educational offspring it produces. Not since Paul Willis' "Learning to Labor" has an educational ethnography about schooling so pushed the limits of current social theory. Now, in a new edition to this classic text, McLaren engages with some of the latest anthropological thinking and presents readers with a powerful manifesto for critical ethnography in the coming millennium.