Scripted Bodies

Saltman’s book takes us into new and frightening areas of educational excess and repression that focus on the body, and explores their impact on the possibilities of teaching and learning – that is, the erasure of thinking. This is a nightmare world of apps, performance-enhancing drugs, and big business. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical resources and up-to-the-minute data, this book is both terrifying and analytically stunning. -- Stephen J. Ball, Institute of Education, University of London

In Scripted Bodies, Ken Saltman offers an engaging analysis of how pedagogical strategies easily become repressive. Saltman focuses on how "new" pedagogies manipulate students’ corporeal selves, an essential counterpoint to the ubiquitous psychological and behavioral orientations to cognitive and social-emotional aspects of learning and development. This book breaks down the mind-body distinction that permeates pedagogy, and situates pedagogy within a socio-political context defined by corporations and technologies. Saltman ends on a hopeful note of resistance to recapture genuine democratic conditions for schooling and beyond. -- Sandra Mathison, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

This is possibly Saltman's masterwork. It's a heart-pounding and eye-opening account of the discipline-and-punish pedagogy that our children endure in nearly all walks of life. This is no theoretical tale, but a keenly observed documentation of the horrifying but real ways schools control children's bodies in order to control their minds.--Marc Bousquet, author of How the University Works, and professor of Film and Media, Emory University