Controlling Our Children

Book excerpt: Controlling Our Children: Hegemony and Deconstructing the Positive Behavioral Intervention Support Model represents the first steps in a protest movement. It is a microscopic look into a system that educators take for granted as a positive force for children. In a thorough and detailed fashion, Thomas David Knestrict deconstructs the troubling history, development, and eventual embrace of a ubiquitous system of control that our public schools and government now mandate for use. Knestrict uses a powerful social justice lens to reconstruct the framework of a more responsive and just system of supports that result in autonomy, not scripted control. Controlling Our Children is perfect for pre-service teachers learning how to manage a classroom that fosters autonomy and an internal locus of control. It is also a perfect book for a graduate-level course in discipline discourse or disability studies. This book is for anyone who is at all worried about imposed systems of control that hinder the development of free will, freedom of choice, and personal autonomy in an age of false news, political manipulation, and control.