Sartre and No Child Left Behind

Sartre and No Child Left Behind: An Existential Psychoanalytic Anthropology of Urban Schooling asks two fundamental questions: "e;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?"e; 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 "e;existential psychoanalytic anthropology."e; 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.