Postmodernism in the West and postsocialism in Eastern Europe have deep features in common as they both challenge the foundations of the world order. They create a new educational situation where basic issues of subjectivity, identity, human freedom, and social agency need to be reevaluated and reconstructed. This situation affects both sides of the former Iron Curtain since East and West served as each other's Other in terms of identity formation. This book deals with the problem of freedom and identity in educational theories as they are reinterpreted in the critical perspective of postmodern social theory and postsocialist political openness. Issues of freedom and identity are considered as dialectically related to those of power and emancipation. This book sketches a metatheoretical perspective on emancipatory education in a broad, trans-cultural context appropriate to the new global community.

TOMASZ SZKUDLAREK is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Education at the University of Gdansk in Poland. He has written books on critical pedagogy published in Poland and numerous articles in educational journals.

Series Foreword by Henry A. Giroux
East-West, Right-Left: Postmodernism, Postsocialism, and the Problem of Education
East-West, Right-Left: A Horizontal Geography of Discourse
School and Domination: Hidden Curricula and Political Control
East-West, Right-Left: Ideological Geography and the Problem of Education
The Eye, The Tongue, and The Self: Power, Identity, and the Problem of Freedom
Educational History of Freedom: Knowledge, Enlightenment, Liberation
Postmodern Freedom
Subjectivity: Beyond Subjection The Eye of the Power; The Body of the Subject; The Tongue Knowledge
Freedom and Postmodern Education
Within the Modern Tradition: Choice and Identity in Conservative and Liberal Pegagogies
Nihilism-Holism: Education Between Deconstruction and the New Gnosis of Science
Beyond Individualism: Freedom in Critical Pegagogy
Determinism, Subjectivity, and the Question of Freedom: Toward a Theoretical Closure of Educational (Post)Modernism
Cultural Colonialism and Emancipation: Negotiating the Discourse of Freedom
Educational Change in Poland
Politics: Difference and Hegemony
The Paradox of Emancipation
Negotiating the Discourse of Freedom: Education Against Identity?
Selected Bibliography
Index