Critical theories of education, in focusing on the social reproductive function of school systems,often fail to emphasize the potential of teachers as agents of educational and social change. Dennis Carlson criticizes this tendency as he reviews and analyzes the treatment of teachers in influential forms of critical theory. In laying the basis for a view of teachers as an important force for transformative change in the schools, the author also reviews the historical development of teachers' professional and trade-union movements, locating them in a general analysis of U.S. work culture. He argues that since teachers are victims of the current system of public education, their collective interests as workers are more compatible with transformative than with merely reformist change.

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In this article, the author explores some of the implications of cultural studies perspectives on representation, curriculum, and pedagogy. The most significant and far reaching of these implications has to do with the postmodern disruption of the binary opposition that has framed thinking about education in the modern era: the logos/mythos or truth/myth binary. To develop these ideas, the article focuses on the mythologizing of Rosa Parks as a new, multicultural hero in American education and popular culture. The author argues that although the growing attention to Parks's life must be taken as a hopeful sign that new multicultural heroes are beginning to be celebrated in the curriculum, as Parks's life has been mythologized, it increasingly has been incorporated within a nonthreatening and even culturally conservative mythology. The article then explores some of the attributes of alternative, more progressive mythologizings of Parks's life.

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