Introduction to Part II

Abstract

This chapter, the first in the second section outlines examples of how schools oppress and what the authors believe currently prevents quality willed learning from being realized. Carlo Ricci uses auto/biography, auto/ethnography, and narrative inquiry to expose the abuses that schooling administers on students, teachers, professors, and teaching assistants/sessionals. He starts by sharing his story to help the reader frame and understand what has led him to believe what he has come to believe and think the way that he has come to think. He starts the chapter by writing a few words about his choice of methodology. He shares how throughout, he will weave a narrative that knits his story with others’ stories to create a tale of idiotic proportions, a tale of pain, suffering, and injustice: a tale of schooling. He goes on to offer an overview of the section. Although the titles of each of the chapters suggest that the focus is on a particular group as victims, as you read them, the hope is that it becomes clear that there are many victims in each chapter and, more importantly, that in a holistic sense we are all victimized by the poisoned apple. By offering a variety of stakeholders in a variety of levels within institutional schooling, the hope is that the reader will get a sense of how ubiquitous and ingrained victimization is, and that the problem is a systemic one that impacts all of mainstream schooling.