With all the talk about values in this country, the time has come for educators to engage in serious discussion with their colleagues and students about the sociohistorical construction of values, meaning, identity, and subjectivity, and their inherent relationship to power, as well as about who speaks, from what position, who is heard, and who dictates policy. Thirteen Questions: Reframing Education's Conversation takes up these very issues. Editors Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg have assembled a group of influential intellectuals, including Maxine Greene, Joyce King, William Pinar, and Deborah Britzman, who address questions such as "What are the basics and are we teaching them?" "Who decides the forms schools have taken, and who should decide?" "What is good teaching?" "Should the fact that we live in a democratic society make a difference in what our schools are like?" "In what ways do gender, race, and class affect the educational process?" and "What are schools for and what should we be doing in the name of education?"

The essays elaborate on the potential of theory to create the conditions within which students develop the critical skills to become active and responsible citizens, capable of hoping, struggling, understanding, and negotiating difference, and eliminating human suffering. Thirteen Questions is an important contribution to understanding and realizing a truly critical multicultural democracy.

P.L.