Dropping Out, Drifting Off, Being Excluded: Becoming Somebody Without School

by John Smyth, Robert Hattam

This books deals with one of the most urgent, damaging, and complex issues affecting young lives and contemporary society in general -- the escalating high school dropout rate. Though against the wishes of teachers and school administrators, young people's decision to leave school is usually made under circumstances that provide little time or space for discussion. This book provides a disturbing account of how students' voices are over-ridden -- lost in the imposition of curriculum and the rush to impose testing, accountability, and management regimes on schools. 'Dropping Out, ' Drifting Off, Being Excluded reveals the complex stories that surround identity formation in young lives and the « interactive trouble as young people struggle to be heard within inhospitable schools and an equally unhelpful education system.

Paperback

First published February 4, 2004

About the author

Research professor of education at the University of Ballarat. He is author/editor of fifteen books including, most recently, Teachers in the Middle: Reclaiming the Wasteland of the Adolescent
Years of Schooling (with Peter McInerney, Peter Lang Publishing, 2007) and “Dropping Out” Drifting Off, Being Excluded: Becoming Somebody Without School (with Robert Hattam and others, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004). His research interests include policy ethnographies of schooling, issues of social justice, community renewal, and
policy sociology of students’ lives and teachers’ work