Sartre and No Child Left Behind

Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling asks two fundamental questions: "Who do students become as a result of inhabiting impoverished urban schools for eight hours a day, five days a week, over the course of several years? What happens to the hearts, minds, and spirits of these children?" Using nine months of field observation and interviews with students, teachers, and administrators at a New York City middle school-The Academy (pseudonym)-the book offers an in-depth analysis of students' psychological and emotional experiences of the Title I school environment. Ultimately, the book demonstrates how the children's experiences become a part of a vicious chain of events. The history of racial segregation guarantees inferior schooling conditions, and as a result, the students perform poorly; the school closes; gentrification efforts accelerate these closings; and ultimately, the school's community dies a whisper-less death. Propelling the study is a new anthropological theory of human consciousness. By synthesizing the insights of Sartre, Africana existentialists, phenomenologists, and sociocultural anthropologists, Parker offers a preliminary outline for a theory that he names "existential psychoanalytic anthropology." Based on Sartre's existential psychoanalysis, which asserts that we choose who we are from a field of possible beings that we encounter in our cultural environment, existential psychoanalytic anthropology studies the complex ways that culture and consciousness work together to form an individual being.

Darian Parker is a psychological anthropologist and founder and CEO of Parker Academics.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Disclaimer
Introduction
Chapter 1. Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology
Chapter 2. From Plessy to NCLB: The "Peculiar" Practice of Segregation in American Public Education
Chapter 3. Four Dimensionality and the Ironic
Chapter 4. The Bad School
Chapter 5. Androids and Infernal Feedback Loops
Chapter 6. The State ELA Examination
Chapter 7. Mr. Wheeler
Chapter 8. Being Toward Eradication: School Closing and Gentrification
Chapter 9. Recommendations: Revising Legal Discourses, Educational Policies and Systems of Accountability
Bibliography
About the Author