Toward a critical theory of education -- Marxian perspectives on educational philosophy : from classical Marxism to critical pedagogy -- Exploring the roots of digital and media literacy through personal narrative -- Critical pedagogy, cultural studies, and radical democracy : reflections on the work of Henry Giroux -- Multimedia pedagogy and multicultural education for the new millennium -- Reading images critically : toward a postmodern pedagogy -- New technologies/new literacies : reconstructing education for democracy and social justice -- Digital culture, media, and the challenges of contemporary cyborg youth.

"The following studies present a critical theory of education for democratizing and reconstructing education to meet the challenges of a global and technological society. This project involves articulating a metatheory for the philosophy of education and providing a historical genealogy and grounding of key themes of a democratic reconstruction of education which indicates what traditional aspects of education should be overcome and what alternative pedagogies and principles should reconstruct education in the present age. Education has always involved colonization of children, youth, the underclasses, immigrants, and members of the society at large into the values, behavior, labor skills, competitiveness, and submission to authority to serve the needs of white, patriarchal capitalism and to transmit the ideologies that Marx and Engels saw as the "ruling ideas of the ruling class" (1978), and which bell hooks (1994) reminds us also includes the ruling ideas of white men and colonization of the subjects of education into White, Patriarchal Capitalism. The decolonization of education thus necessarily involves critique of dominant ideologies, pedagogies, and the current organization of education, to be replaced by what Freire calls "the pedagogy of the oppressed" (1970). This project includes developing multiple critical literacies as a response to digital technologies and developing critical pedagogies to meet the challenges of globalization, multiculturalism, and institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism, while promoting radical democratization to counter the trend toward the imposition of a neo-liberal business model on education. In addition, a democratic and intersectional reconstruction of education needs to build on and synthesize perspectives of classical philosophy of education, Deweyean radical pragmatism, Freirean critical pedagogy, poststructuralism, and various critical theories of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, indigeneity, and more, while criticizing obsolete idealist, elitist and antidemocratic aspects of traditional concepts of education. Hence, I present critical pedagogies to reconstruct education in the contemporary era in a text that should be accessible and useful for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and others interested in the democratization of education"--