Abstract

Research on labor and its treatment in the curriculum of K-12 schools has not been a popular topic. Society’s emphasis on individualism and consumerism has fostered veneration of capitalism throughout public education, with business control of the education policy system. Critical information about the US Labor Movement has been systematically excluded from the public school curriculum, so that labor’s centrality to the flow of history and its contributions to the present status of working people are underappreciated, and neoliberalism threatens public education and teacher unionism around the world. This article describes why and how an alliance of teacher educators, teachers, and unionists are 34 Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society – Volume 14 – Autumn 2009 advocating for labor consciousness to be infused into K-12 schooling. This perspective is presented in Organizing the Curriculum, an edited collection of essays, and is being implemented by the Education & Labor Collaborative, an advocacy group to promote economic, social and political empowerment through education for labor consciousness.