Introduction: Curriculum dis/positions

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book expands their earlier conceptual efforts to encourage the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s seminal works Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by scholars and teachers to continue to reconceptualize curriculum theory in the twenty-first century. Legislation like No Child Left behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top, the increasing corporatization of public education, and the politics surrounding the training of new teachers as administrative workers make this intervention critical. The book revisits their original argument, responds to critics, and reimagines the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s work a decade later. In 2004, in the Afterword of the first edition, they speculated that the further the United States went into administering NCLB as a means of reforming public education, the worse educational outcomes would become.