Essay Review: "A Psychoanalyst in the Classroom: On the Human Condition in Education"

None of our normative measures help us encounter the human fact of dependency, the questions of love and hate, what learning feels like, why ideas make us nervous, what the contingencies of emotional life have to do with the ways in which thinking goes missing, and how one makes sense of discontentment in and desire for attaching to an education we know nothing about... [...]well-worn discussions about school choice, teachers and their unions, top-down accountability, school "failure," evidence-based practices and standardized testing are characteristics of a neoliberal era of federal school reforms that rely on standardization, high-stakes accountability, school closure, merit-based funding, and more (Spring, 2014).