Alexander J Means

This book examines the entanglement of capitalism, technological acceleration and AI, and warns that they are eroding education as a means of collective intelligence. Alexander J. Means shows how our desires, dreams, emotions, and psychic life have become the target of optimizing drives and algorithmic manipulation aimed at extracting value from thought and time. He argues that this is leading to a disintegration of meaning, knowledge, and culture, allowing Fascism, fraud, racism, ecocide, and war to thrive in an environment of systemic nihilism and the collapse of memory into computation. He examines how education has become a brand word and how education is being reduced to training in compliance and suggests ways to stop this trend. Means draws on a range of theorists book including Franco Berardi, Alain Badiou, Byung-Hul Chan, Fredric Jameson and Achille Mbembe. The book represents a warning against a life of fundamentalism, money, consumption, and power and argues that education should, in contradiction to the current trends, be equipping young people and adults with the tools to live a life filled with meaning and purpose.

This book examines the entanglement of capitalism, technological acceleration and AI, and warns that they are eroding education as a means of collective intelligence. Alexander J. Means shows how our desires, dreams, emotions, and psychic life have become the target of optimizing drives and algorithmic manipulation aimed at extracting value from thought and time. He argues that this is leading to a disintegration of meaning, knowledge, and culture, allowing Fascism, fraud, racism, ecocide, and war to thrive in an environment of systemic nihilism and the collapse of memory into computation. He examines how education has become a brand word and how education is being reduced to training in compliance and suggests ways to stop this trend. Means draws on a range of theorists book including Franco Berardi, Alain Badiou, Byung-Hul Chan, Fredric Jameson and Achille Mbembe. The book represents a warning against a life of fundamentalism, money, consumption, and power and argues that education should, in contradiction to the current trends, be equipping young people and adults with the tools to live a life filled with meaning and purpose.

Toward a New Common School Movement is a bold and urgent call to action. The authors argue that corporate school reform in the United States represents a failed project subverted by profiteering, corruption, and educational inequalities. Toward a New Common School Movement suggests that educational privatization and austerity are not simply bad policies but represent a broader redistribution of control over social life-that is, the enclosure of the global commons. This condition requires far more than a liberal defense of public schooling. It requires recovering elements of the radical progressive educational tradition while generating a new language of the common suitable to the unique challenges of the global era. Toward a New Common School Movement traces the history of struggles over public schooling in the United States and provides a set of ethical principles for enacting the commons in educational policy, finance, labor, curriculum, and pedagogy. Ultimately, it argues for global educational struggles in common for a just and sustainable future beyond the crises of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.

Toward a New Common School Movement is a bold and urgent call to action. The authors argue that corporate school reform in the United States represents a failed project subverted by profiteering, corruption, and educational inequalities. Toward a New Common School Movement suggests that educational privatization and austerity are not simply bad policies but represent a broader redistribution of control over social life-that is, the enclosure of the global commons. This condition requires far more than a liberal defense of public schooling. It requires recovering elements of the radical progressive educational tradition while generating a new language of the common suitable to the unique challenges of the global era. Toward a New Common School Movement traces the history of struggles over public schooling in the United States and provides a set of ethical principles for enacting the commons in educational policy, finance, labor, curriculum, and pedagogy. Ultimately, it argues for global educational struggles in common for a just and sustainable future beyond the crises of neoliberalism and predatory capitalism.