Knowledge, Power, and Education: The selected works of Michael W. Apple [1 ed.] 041552900X, 9780415529006

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Knowledge, Power, and Education

For more than three decades, Michael W. Apple has sought to uncover and articulate the connections among knowledge, teaching, and power in education. His germinal Ideology and Curriculum was a watershed title in critical education studies, and has remained in print since its publication in 1979. The more than two dozen books and hundreds of papers, articles, and chapters published since have likewise all contributed to a greater understanding of the relationship between and among the economy, political, and cultural power in society on the one hand “and the ways in which education is thought about, organized, and evaluated” on the other. In this collection, Apple brings together 13 of his key writings in one place, providing an overview not just of his own career, but of the larger development of the field. A new introduction re-­examines the scope of his work and his earlier arguments, and reflects on what remains to be done for those committed to critical education. Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

World Library of Educationalists series

Lessons from History of Education The selected works of Richard Aldrich Richard Aldrich Knowledge, Power, and Education The selected works of Michael W. Apple Michael W. Apple Education Policy and Social Class The selected works of Stephen J. Ball Stephen J. Ball Race, Culture, and Education The selected works of James A. Banks James A. Banks In Search of Pedagogy Volume I The selected works of Jerome Bruner, 1957–1978 Jerome S. Bruner In Search of Pedagogy Volume II The selected works of Jerome Bruner, 1979–2006 Jerome S. Bruner Reimagining Schools The selected works of Elliot W. Eisner Elliot W. Eisner Reflecting Where the Action Is The selected works of John Elliot John Elliot The Development and Education of the Mind The selected works of Howard Gardner Howard Gardner

Constructing Worlds through Science Education The selected works of John K. Gilbert John K. Gilbert Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics The selected works of Ivor F. Goodson Ivor F. Goodson Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Research The selected works of Mary E. James Mary E. James Teaching, Learning and Education in Late Modernity The selected works of Peter Jarvis Peter Jarvis Education, Markets, and the Public Good The selected works of David F. Labaree David F. Labaree A Life in Education The selected works of John Macbeath John Macbeath Overcoming Exclusion Social Justice through Education Peter Mittler Learner-Centered English Language Education The selected works of David Nunan David Nunan Educational Philosophy and Politics The selected works of Michael A. Peters Michael A. Peters Corporatism, Social Control, and Cultural Domination in Education: From the Radical Right to Globalization The selected works of Joel Spring Joel Spring The Curriculum and the Child The selected works of John White John White The Art and Science of Teaching and Learning The selected works of Ted Wragg E.C. Wragg

Knowledge, Power, and Education

The selected works of Michael W. Apple

Michael W. Apple

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Michael W. Apple to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Apple, Michael W. Knowledge, power, and education : the selected works of Michael W. Apple / by Michael W. Apple. p. cm. – (World library of educationalists series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Critical pedagogy. 2. Educational sociology. 3. Education and state. 4. Education–Curricula. I. Apple, Michael W. II. Title. LC196.A75 2012 370.11'5–dc23 2012026848 ISBN: 978-0-415-52899-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-11811-5 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Acknowledgments

  1 On Being a Scholar/Activist: An Introduction to Knowledge, Power, and Education

viii 1

  2 On Analyzing Hegemony

19

  3 Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling

41

  4 Seeing Education Relationally: The Stratification of Culture and People in the Sociology of School Knowledge (with Lois Weis)

69

  5 Curricular Form and the Logic of Technical Control: Commodification Returns

92

  6 Controlling the Work of Teachers

116

  7 The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum: Culture as Lived—I

132

  8 The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook

152

  9 Cultural Politics and the Text

168

10 Consuming the Other: Whiteness, Education, and Cheap French Fries

186

11 The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?

195

12 Producing Inequalities: Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice

212

13 “We Are the New Oppressed”: Gender, Culture, and the Work of Home Schooling

241

14 Global Crises, Social Justice, and Teacher Education

258



About the Author Index

279 280

Acknowledgments

In a number of ways, this selection of my work is the result of collective efforts. For over four decades, I have met every Friday afternoon with my graduate students and the many visiting scholars and activists who have come to spend time with me at the University of Wisconsin. I asked former and current members of the Friday Seminar for their suggestions. From the large number of books, chapters, articles, and opinion pieces I’ve written over the years, what should be included? Predictably, this group of people—many of whom are now spread all over the world—weighed in with an extensive list. Given the limits of a book such as this, I could not include all of the recommendations. But I want to publicly thank the past and present members of the Friday Seminar for their collective wisdom in helping in the process of putting this book together. I have had discussions about the content of this book with other friends and colleagues as well. In particular, Luis Armando Gandin, Wayne Au, David Gillborn, Stephen Ball, and Geoff Whitty have helped me think through the process and the content. Anna Clarkson first suggested the volume and took my questions very seriously during meetings we had in London. Catherine Bernard once again demonstrated why she is one of the very best publishers and editors with whom I have ever worked. Diane Falkner and Elham Milani were very helpful in doing a large number of tasks that accompany putting together a collection of writings that spans decades. As always, Rima D. Apple acted as the best sounding board for my concerns and ideas about a project such as this. The selections in this book have come from the following sources. For those chapters that have come from my own books, I have used the most recent editions. For example, even though the first edition of Ideology and Curriculum was originally published in 1979, the material included here has come from the third edition. The page numbers cited in the Acknowledgments, thus, refer to the latest editions of these books. “On Analyzing Hegemony,” Ideology and Curriculum, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 1–23, 204–205. “Seeing Education Relationally: The Stratification of Culture and People in the Sociology of School Knowledge,” Journal of Education, 168, 1 (1986), pp. 7–34. (With Lois Weis)

Acknowledgments   ix “Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling,” Ideology and Curriculum, 3rd edition. New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 117–144, 217–220. “Curricular Form and the Logic of Technical Control: Commodification Returns,” Education and Power, Routledge Classic edition. New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 123–148, 180–184. “Controlling the Work of Teachers,” Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education.” Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, pp. 31–53, 209–214. “The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum,” Education and Power, Routledge Classic edition. New York: Routledge, 2012, pp. 61–82, 171–175. “The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook,” in Michael W. Apple and Linda Christian-­Smith, eds. The Politics of the Textbook. New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 24–40. “Cultural Politics and the Text,” Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 42–60, 185–188. “Consuming the Other: Whiteness, Education, and Cheap French Fries,” in Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda Powell, and L. M. Wong, eds. Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society. New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 121–128. “The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?” Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, pp.  22–41, 122–126. “Producing Inequalities: Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice,” Educating the “Right” Way: Markets, Standards, God, and Inequality, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 53–85, 273–279. “We Are the New Oppressed: Gender, Culture, and the Work of Home Schooling,” in Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. Buras, eds. The Subaltern Speak: Curriculum, Power, and Educational Struggles. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 75–93. “Global Crises, Social Justice, and Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education 62 (March/April 2011), pp. 222–234.

1 On Being a Scholar/Activist An Introduction to Knowledge, Power, and Education

Getting There Books of collected works are always interesting to me. They require that the author reflect back on a trajectory that may not be totally clear even to the writer herself or himself. They ask a writer to construct a historical narrative that is simultaneously both personal and intellectual/political. In this introductory chapter, I want to engage with this combined task, to reflect on some of the history of the development of my work over time and, at the same time, to situate this development in some of the more personal groundings that might explain how and why the work I’ve done came about. Let me start with a personal story. It was late in the evening and I had just come home after a day of teaching—filled with the combination of exhaustion, tension, and sometimes pure joy that accompanies working in schools. There was something waiting for me, a letter from Teachers College (TC), Columbia University. I opened it with much trepidation but the news was good. I was admitted to the Philosophy of Education program there. I had been accepted elsewhere, but this was the 1960s and in my mind “TC” was the place to be if one was deeply interested in challenging the taken for granted assumptions and practices of schooling. To tell you the truth, I was surprised that I had been admitted. I had gone to two small state teachers colleges at night for my undergraduate degree, a degree that was not yet finished since I had to complete some required courses that summer. And, while working full-­time as a printer before my part-­time undergraduate career was interrupted by the army, my grade point average was, to be honest, pretty horrible. Luckily, TC focused on my post-­army last two years of college work. The army had “trained” me to be a teacher and many urban schools were facing a very serious teacher shortage. Thus, I began teaching without a degree in the inner city schools of Paterson, New Jersey—schools I had attended as a child1—and then moved to teach in a small rural and strikingly conservative town in southern New Jersey for a number of years where I predictably had some serious conflicts with ultra-­conservative and racist groups (see Apple 1999). This fact may partly account for some of the reasons I focused on the growth in power of conservative social and religious movements in education and the larger society in a good deal of my later writing. I had also been a president of a teachers union, a continuation of a family tradition of political activism.2 I loved teaching; but I was more than a little distressed by the ways in which teachers were treated, by curricula that were almost totally disconnected

2   On Being a Scholar/Activist from the world of the children and communities in which I worked, and by policies that seemed to simply reproduce the poverty that surrounded me. Having grown up poor myself, this was not something that gave me much to be happy about as you might imagine. Taken together, all of this pushed me toward applying for a Masters degree, with the aim of returning to the classroom. But something happened to me at Columbia. I found a way, a “vocation,” that enabled me to combine my interests in politics, education, and the gritty materialities of daily life in schools. I ultimately continued on for a doctorate. Going to TC during the late 1960s was a remarkable experience in many ways. It treated intellectual work seriously and pushed me and others to the limits of what was possible to read and understand. For me, although I was already grounded in an intense family tradition of radical literacy, since I was coming from night school this was one of the first times in my formal educational career that I had been treated as if I could deal with some of the most complicated historical, economic, conceptual, political, and practical issues surrounding education. I loved it but at the very same time was dismayed by it. The reason for the dismay was because TC (and Columbia University as a whole) was basically right next to Harlem and yet its relations with impoverished schools and with the Black and Latino communities nearby were often tense. This very fact provided students like me with a bit of kindling for the gritty anger that many of us already felt. This of course was complemented by the reality that Columbia was a deeply politicized environment at the time. The fact that I had already been an activist in anti-­racist, anti-­corporate, and anti-­war movements meant that the pressure cooker of studying at Columbia had to be balanced with the demands of political action. Somehow I and others did it. In philosophy of education, I worked with Jonas Soltis, a fine analytic philosopher and teacher, and someone who recognized that there might be something worthwhile in my rough and not yet polished conceptual abilities. But Jonas also recognized that whatever my growing conceptual talents (and they were growing since he was indeed a good teacher), I was chafing at the lack of connection between the world of analytic philosophy and the struggles over curricula, teaching, and community participation in schools. While I was clearly influenced by the analytic work of Ryle, Austin, and especially Wittgenstein, and by the historical treatments of the growth of significant philosophical traditions such as that of John Herman Randall, Jr., Jonas knew almost before I did that my real interests were centered on the politics of curriculum and teaching. Near the end of my first year at TC, he sent me to see Alice Miel, the Chair of Curriculum and Teaching, and someone whose contributions to democratic curriculum have not been sufficiently recognized. And Alice sent me to see Dwayne Huebner. Her suggestion had a profound impact on all that I have done. Very few doctoral students had finished with Dwayne. He was exceptionally demanding (of himself as well as his students) and he was among the most creative critical curriculum scholars in the history of the field.3 He said that we needed to rethink all that we thought we knew about society, about schooling, about nearly ­everything (see, e.g., Huebner 1999). Dwayne sent me away with a list of more than 50 books to read—in philosophy, social theory, literature and literary theory, and curriculum history. For some this would have been off-­putting but for some reason, I took up the challenge and we met again—and again and again. I pored over the books. It was a

On Being a Scholar/Activist   3 bewildering array and yet I began to see a pattern, a set of ways in which our common-­ sense must be and could be challenged. My political and pedagogic commitment to understanding and interrupting common-­sense that was so much a part of my political and educational activity earlier and that became the central focus of my work as a scholar/activist throughout my career later on was given direction. If this was a test, I guess I passed it. Dwayne and I spent hours discussing the material. He questioned me; I questioned him. And a mutual bond was built that has lasted for a very long time. There are specific reasons for my not rejecting the challenging readings that Dwayne demanded that I read. As I will state in one of the chapters included in this book, when I was being trained as a teacher (I use the word trained consciously) and went to one of those small state teachers colleges at night, nearly every course that I took had a specific suffix—“for teachers.” I took “Philosophy for Teachers,” “World History for Teachers,” “Mathematics for Teachers,” “Physics for Teachers,” and so on. The assumption seemed to be that since I had attended inner city schools in a very poor community and was going back to teach in those same inner city schools, I needed little more than a cursory understanding of the disciplines of knowledge and the theories that stood behind them. Theory was for those who were above people such as me. There were elements of good sense in this. After all, when I had been taught particular kinds of theory, both at the small state teachers college and even at times later on in my graduate studies, it was all too often totally disconnected from the realities of impoverishment, racism, class dynamics, gendered realities, decaying communities and schools, cultural struggles, and the lives of teachers and community members. But the elements of bad sense, of being intellectually marginalized because of my class background and of so many people like myself being positioned as a “less than,” were palpable. For me and many others who grew up poor and who wanted to more fully understand both our own experiences and why schooling, the economy, and indeed the world itself, looked the way they did, the search for adequate explanations became crucial. Learning and using powerful theory, especially powerful critical theories, in essence, became a counter-­hegemonic act. Getting better at such theories, employing them to more fully comprehend the ways in which differential power actually worked, using them to see where alternatives could be and are being built in daily life, and ultimately doing all this in what we hoped were non-­elitist ways gave us two things. First, all of this made the realities of dominance sensible—and at times depressing. But, second, it also provided a sense of freedom and possibility, especially when it was connected to the political and educational actions in which many of us were also engaged. These same experiences could be spoken of by members of many other groups who have been marginalized by race, sex/gender, class, colonialism, and by an entire array of other forms of differential power. Thus, working with Dwayne Huebner was a deeply formative experience, as was becoming his teaching assistant. Dwayne sent me to The New School for Social Research, a center for radical intellectual work and a home for many of the most influential figures in critical philosophy and social theory, to take courses in phenomenology and critical social and cultural theory. My grounding in critical theory and in the work of Marx, Habermas, Marcuse, and others in that complex tradition can be traced to those experiences at The New School, as can the influence, in particular, of the sociology of knowledge of Alfred Schutz and the radical phenomenological

4   On Being a Scholar/Activist ­ ositions embodied in figures such as Merleau-­Ponty. At the same time, I began to p read two of the people who had truly major influences on me as my work developed later on—Raymond Williams (see Williams 1961, 1977) and Antonio Gramsci (1971). Dwayne insisted that I get to know Maxine Greene well, a person who also had a major influence on me. In essence, I did a joint degree in curriculum studies, philosophy, and sociology under the direction of Dwayne, Jonas, and Maxine. This combination led to a dissertation that brought these traditions together, “Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in the Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge,” at the same time as it provided both the foundation and many of the guiding questions for much of my later work on the relationship among education, knowledge, and power.

Coming to Wisconsin Dwayne had done his PhD at Wisconsin. He and his close friend, the noted curriculum theorist James MacDonald, told stories of Wisconsin and of their experiences there, compelling stories that documented its excellence, its political tradition, and the ways in which it provided a space for critical work. As I was finishing my degree in the spring of 1970, there was a curriculum studies position open there. Dwayne and Jim’s major professor, Vergil Herrick—originally a colleague of Ralph Tyler at Chicago and one of the leading curriculum scholars of his time—had died and his position needed to be filled. Herbert Kliebard was the other curriculum studies person at Wisconsin. Herb had studied at TC under Arno Bellack—a person with whom I too had taken a number of courses—in the generation before mine. Herb’s work on curriculum history had already made a significant impression on me and others. When he called and an interview was arranged, I was more than a little happy—and filled with a bad case of nerves. My first experience of Madison, Wisconsin was arriving in the midst of a large anti-­ war demonstration. The power of the demonstrations (and they continue today), the intellectual and political openness of the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, the quality of the students there, the progressive political traditions of the state and the community—all of these combined to make me feel that I had found a home. No place is perfect, but Wisconsin continues to be a special place, an institution where I have spent over four decades. Even though I have been a Visiting Professor at many universities nationally and internationally, few have that rare combination of a critical core, an expectation of the organic joining of excellence and political/ethical commitment, and a democratic and participatory ethos that characterize the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Of course, like many places, neoliberal pressures are a threat to this combination of characteristics. But, though not impos­ sible, it will be harder to transform Wisconsin than other institutions.

Knowledge and Power—First Steps Wisconsin provided the space for truly serious critical work, work that could be engaged. It was an ideal place to be a “scholar/activist.” In the early 1970s, in addition to the other writing I was doing on teacher education, on critical studies of curriculum and evaluation, and on student rights, I began the initial work on a book that was to

On Being a Scholar/Activist   5 take nearly five years to complete, Ideology and Curriculum (1979/1990/2004).4 (Luckily, I had been given tenure in 1973 after only three years at Wisconsin, and was promoted to full professor after only three more years, so the pressure was off.) The aim of that early book was not only to revitalize the curriculum field, but also to challenge both “liberal” educational policies and practices, and the reductive and essentializing theories of the role of education that had become influential in critical analysis, books such as Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1976). In Ideology and Curriculum, I argued that education must be seen as a political act. I suggested that in order to do this, we needed to think relationally. That is, understanding education requires that we situate it back into both the unequal relations of power in the larger society and the relations of exploitation, dominance, and subordination—and the conflicts—that generate and are generated by these relations. Others had said some of this at the time, but they were all too general. I wanted to focus on the connections between knowledge and power, since in my mind—and in that of many others—cultural struggles were crucial to any serious movements for social transformation. Thus, rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our (all too common) tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? What is the relationship between this knowledge and how it is organized and taught, and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and who does not? What can we do as critical educators and activists to change existing educational and social inequalities, and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just? During the writing of Ideology and Curriculum, I came into contact with a number of people in England who were doing similar critical work on the relationship between knowledge and power. The “New Sociology of Education” in England had nearly exactly the same intuitions and used many of the same resources as critical curriculum studies did in the United States (see, e.g., Young 1971; Dale et al. 1976). As my analyses became popular there, international connections were cemented in place. This led to my first lectures in England in 1976 and created a set of intellectual and political bonds that continue to this day. I am certain that Ideology and Curriculum would not have been seen as such a major contribution without the political and academic influences of these colleagues in England, in particular Geoff Whitty, Roger Dale, Madeleine Arnot, Basil Bernstein, and Paul Willis. (This set of interactions and the mutually supportive influences and discussions that have gone on have continued over the years as the Institute of Education at the University of London became something of a “second home” for me and with my appointment as World Scholar and Professor there. Current and past colleagues at the Institute of Education, especially David Gillborn, Deborah Youdell, Stephen Ball, and Geoff Whitty, have kept the tradition of intense debate and friendship alive and well.) Earlier, I mentioned the kinds of questions that Ideology and Curriculum raised. Yet, it is important to state that the book was grounded in a large array of issues and literature. Indeed, Ideology and Curriculum enabled me to synthesize a considerable number of the influences that had been working through me for many years. Let me note them here, since many people see such early work as simply an expression of neo-­Marxism. It is this, but it was so much more. It rested on such traditions as the following: cultural

6   On Being a Scholar/Activist Marxism and Marxist theory; phenomenology and in particular, social phenomenology; the sociology of knowledge; analytic philosophy inside and outside of education; European critical theory; the philosophy, sociology, and history of science; aesthetics and the philosophy of art; political economy and studies of the labor process; the new sociology of education in England and France; and last but certainly not least, the critical and literary traditions within education and curriculum studies. Thus, Ideology and Curriculum was meant to speak to a much larger array of educational, social, cultural, and political issues than some might have realized. And it certainly could not be captured by overly simplistic slogans such as curriculum “reconceptualization,” a term with a very weak empirical and historical warrant. I fully recognize that Ideology and Curriculum bears the mark of its time. It devotes most of its energy to unpacking the role that curriculum and pedagogy play in cultural reproduction. It is part of a tradition of critical analyses of the “reproduction of dominance” that sits side-­by-side with the work of others such as Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. It spends much less time than it should on a more dialectical understanding of knowledge and power, and because of this, it is not as adequate in understanding transformations and struggles (see Weis et al. 2006). But this subject is taken up in the many books that followed and in the additional material included in the newer editions of Ideology and Curriculum, especially in the 25th Anniversary Third Edition, published in 2004. Yet, even with its limitations and silences, the fact that it has gone through multiple editions and revisions, and has been translated into a very large number of languages, means that I must have got something right.

Expanding the Dynamics of Power Ideology and Curriculum was the first step on what became a long journey—for other books followed regularly as I understood more—as I was taught by the criticisms of other scholars and activists throughout the world and certainly by my doctoral students from all over the world at Wisconsin. (There is a reason I regularly thank the Friday Seminar in each of my books. The PhD and Masters students in that group and the visiting scholars from universities throughout the world who have spent time with both me and the group at Wisconsin, have been more than a little influential in my development and keep me honest at all times.) Two other books followed—Education and Power (1982/1995/2012) and Teachers and Texts (1986). This set of books formed what somehow came to be known as the first “Apple trilogy.” The two additional books both corrected some of the errors and spoke to some of the silences in Ideology and Curriculum and expanded the dynamics of power with which we had to be concerned to include gender and race (see also Apple & Weis 1983).5 They focused not only on the interactions between the economic, political, and cultural spheres and the complicated dynamics of reproduction, but also on the power and contradictions of resistance and struggle both inside schools and in the larger society. They critically examined what was happening in curricular content and form, and in teachers’ labor through a process of deskilling, reskilling, and intensification. They illuminated the political economy of the “real” curriculum in schools—the textbook. And they analyzed the spaces where possible counter-­hegemonic action could take place. In this, I was influenced as well by my

On Being a Scholar/Activist   7 interactions with colleagues working at the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The path I was on now was even more involved, and the relations and realities I was trying to understand were even more complex. These issues demanded more attention. But looking back on the first set of books, I can now see more clearly that they led me from largely neo-­Marxist analyses of social and cultural reproduction that were influenced by Gramsci, Williams, and Althusser and by concepts such as hegemony and over-­determination (see also Apple 1982), to an (unromantic) emphasis on agency and on the politics and economics of cultural production, to treatments of teachers’ work and lives, to an enlargement of political and cultural struggles to complement (but definitely not abandon) my original focus on class, and more recently to sustained critical analyses of how powerful movements and alliances can radically shift the relationship between educational policies and practices and the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society, but not in a direction that any of us would find ethically or politically justifiable. All of these efforts over the years have been grounded in a sense of the significance of cultural struggles and of the crucial place that schools, curricula, teachers, and communities play in these struggles.

Understanding Conservative Social Movements in Education Another series of books followed—this time four books—these focusing much more directly on the ways in which power currently worked and on how we might interrupt these relations. In books such as Official Knowledge (1993/2000), Cultural Politics and Education (1996), The State and the Politics of Knowledge (2003), and Educating the “Right” Way (2006a), I spent a good deal of time showing that it is social movements, not educators, who are the real engines of educational transformations. And the social movements that continue to be the most powerful now are more than a little conservative. In essence, I have claimed that if you want to understand how to engage in a successful large-­scale pedagogic campaign that changes people’s common-­sense about legitimate knowledge, teaching, and evaluation—indeed about schooling in general— examine those people who have actually done it. I certainly hadn’t abandoned my previous concerns with knowledge and power, but I now had better tools. And the politics were now even more pressing since educators all over the world were facing a set of conservative attacks that were deeply damaging to any education worth its name. In the process of engaging with these issues, I have also had to engage with debates over postmodern and poststructural theories. I have been a consistent critic of the over-­statements and loss of historical memory found within some postmodern and poststructural writings in education and the larger literature. However, concerns with identity, the politics of language, the multiplicity of power relations, and contingency, required that I take seriously some of the issues that this literature raised and that I integrate a number of poststructural elements into my conceptual apparatus. As I have said elsewhere, I am not in a church, so I am not worried about heresy. But let me be very clear here. Postmodern and poststructural approaches are not replacements for more structural understandings. It is where these traditions “rub against each other” in tense relationships that progress can be made (see Apple 1999; Apple & Whitty 1999). But any analysis that does not deal seriously with exploitation alongside its analysis of

8   On Being a Scholar/Activist domination—what Nancy Fraser (1997) calls a politics of redistribution as well as a politics of recognition—is deeply limiting. In each of the books I have written I have tried to keep that awareness in the forefront of my thinking (see Apple 2013). It is this combination and the epistemological, and at times political tensions that exist between and within these traditions, that I think has allowed me to see more clearly the ways in which the politics of common-­sense operate. My Gramscian position and the critical edge it brings has some overlaps with some of the elements of poststructural understandings. This may be one of the reasons I have found Stuart Hall’s insightful analyses of cultural politics, of race, identity, and nation, and of the rise of rightist movements so useful (see, e.g., Morley & Chen 1996; Apple 2008). However, I was not only engaged with the debate over “post” positions. As in my earlier work, and very much like Stuart Hall, I also wanted to distance myself from the return of economistic and essentializing—and overly rhetorical—positions. For example, there seemed to be a loss of many of the gains that had been made in our understanding of the complexities of class relations within the state and between the state and civil society—as if Althusser, Poulantzas, Jessop, Dale, and others had never written anything of importance. The immensely productive material on the relationship between ideology and identity, on the relationship among culture, identity, and political economy, on the crucial impact of politics, and on the power of social movements that cut across class lines, as well as a number of other issues, was now seen by some to be either a rejection of key tenets of the Marxist and neo-­Marxist traditions (the plural is absolutely crucial here), or these advances were said to deal with epiphenomenal concerns. Similar things were (and are) said about such constitutive dynamics as race and gender On both sides of the Atlantic, a small group of people had mounted attacks on these advances in the name of purifying “the” tradition from the taint of culturalism and from the sin of worrying too much about, say, gender and race at the expense of class. The British version of this simply does not understand the history of the United States and the salience of race as a relatively autonomous and extraordinarily powerful dynamic in the construction and maintenance of its relations of exploitation and domination, and struggles against them. Like Britain, in the United States there are indeed crucial reasons to deal very seriously with class and the materialities of capitalist relations. However, let me speak very honestly here. As I have worried aloud elsewhere (Apple 2006b), at times this aim of purification feels a bit like posturing, almost as an attempt to situate oneself in a space that says “look at how radical I seem.” Yet such radicalism at times also seems to treat the realities of schools and other cultural and educational sites, and the struggles over them simply rhetorically. It’s as if this particular version of seeming radicalism floats in the air above the material and ideological realities of the object of its analysis—education. This is a deeply unfortunate phenomenon, for if the terms critical education and especially “critical pedagogy” are to have any substantive meaning and if they are to avoid becoming simply rhetorical, they need to have a dynamic and ongoing relationship with the actual practice, people, and institutions of education (see Apple et al. 2009). This situation is puzzling to me, since one would have thought that a truly radical epistemological and political position would be fully grounded in a fundamentally

On Being a Scholar/Activist   9 reflexive relationship with the institutions it is supposedly about. Certainly, this was Marx’s and Gramsci’s position, as it was for most of the radical traditions in education, cultural analyses, and political economy. Schools, teachers, students, parents, community activist groups, curricula, testing; the list could go on—all of these are shunned as if they were forms of pollution that might dirty the pristine discussion of the social relations of production and class antagonisms. Let me again hasten to stress that critical discussions of the social relations of production and of class antagonism are crucial. No critical analysis can be complete without them. But they should be directly connected to something—the specifics of such things as the labor process of teachers and its relation to class and gender and race as well as other powerful dynamics, the neoliberal and neoconservative restructuring of our institutions of education, the racialization of educational policy and practice, the politics of official and popular knowledge, the complex and contradictory effects of globalizations (there are different processes, not a single process, at work here) on the ground, and the actual hard and immensely important work of doing counter-­hegemonic curricula and teaching in schools and other cultural institutions. Theory is best done when it’s about such things, not when it is waving one reading of not very carefully selected texts from the vast writings within these traditions like an iconic talisman floating above the actual struggles both inside and connected to education. These intellectual and political debates, combined with the very evident and very powerful shift to the Right in social and educational policy in so many countries, provided much of the background for this next series of books on conservative social movements. I will say much more about what follows in a number of the chapters included here. But let me repeat some of the arguments you’ll find in the later chapters of this book, since they show where this trajectory had led me for an entire series of recent books. For exactly the same reasons I stated in the previous pages, over the past two decades I have been engaged in a concerted effort to analyze the reasons behind the rightist resurgence—what Roger Dale (Dale 1989/1990) and I call “conservative modernization”—in education and to try to find spaces for interrupting it. My aim has not simply been to castigate the Right, although there is a bit of fun in doing so. Rather, I have also sought to illuminate the dangers, and the elements of good sense, not only bad sense, that are found within what is an identifiable and powerful new “hegemonic bloc” (that is, a powerful set of groups that provide overall leadership to, and pressure on, what the basic goals and policies of a society are). This new rightist alliance is made up of various factions—neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious conservatives, and some members of the professional and managerial new middle class. These are complicated groups, but let me describe them briefly. This power bloc combines multiple fractions of capital who are committed to neoliberal marketized solutions to educational problems, neoconservative intellectuals who want a “return” to higher standards and a “common culture,” authoritarian populist religious evangelicals and fundamentalists who are deeply worried about secularity and the preservation of their own traditions, and particular fractions of the professionally oriented new middle class who are committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability, measurement, and “management.” While there are clear tensions and conflicts within this alliance, in general its overall aims are in providing the educational conditions believed to be necessary both for increasing international competitiveness,

10   On Being a Scholar/Activist profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticized past of the “ideal” home, family, and school. I have had a number of reasons for focusing on the alliance behind conservative modernization. First, these groups are indeed powerful, as any honest analysis of what is happening in education and the larger society clearly indicates. Second, they are quite talented in connecting to people who might ordinarily disagree with them. For this reason, I have shown in a number of places that people who find certain elements of conservative modernization relevant to their lives are not puppets. They are not dupes who have little understanding of the “real” relations of this society. My position is very different. Following a Gramscian perspective, I want to answer the question of “Why and how do people get convinced to accept the understandings and policies of dominant groups?” As I argue in the books written in the 1990s and 2000s, and especially in Educating the “Right” Way (Apple 2006a), and in a number of the chapters represented in the book you are now reading, the reason why some of the arguments coming from the various factions of this new hegemonic bloc are listened to is because they are connected to aspects of the realities that people experience. The tense alliance of neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious activists, and the professional and managerial new middle class works because there has been a very creative articulation of themes that resonate deeply with the experiences, fears, hopes, and dreams of people as they go about their daily lives. Worries about economic insecurity, the destruction of communities, feelings of powerlessness, lack of respect, bureaucratic inaction and intransigence—all of these are based in real things that very many people experience in their daily lives. The Right has often been more than a little manipulative in its articulation of these themes. It has integrated them within racist nativist discourses (indeed “race” and the “Other” as a source of bodily and cultural pollution play crucial roles in the conservative imaginary). And it has connected these themes to economically dominant forms of understanding, and to a problematic sense of “tradition.” But, this integration could only occur if they were organized around people’s understanding of their real material and cultural lives. The second reason I have stressed the tension between good and bad sense and the ability of dominant groups to connect to people’s real understandings of their lives— aside from the continuation of the profound respect for Antonio Gramsci’s writings about this that was so visible even in my early work—has to do with my belief that we have witnessed a major educational accomplishment over the past three decades in many countries. The Right has successfully demonstrated that you need to work at the level of people’s daily experiences, not only in government policies. The accomplishment of such a vast educational project has many implications. It shows how important cultural struggles inside and outside of schools actually are. And, oddly enough, it gives reason for hope. It forces us to ask a significant question. If the Right can do this, why can’t we? I do not mean this as a rhetorical question. As I have argued repeatedly in this next set of four books, the Right has shown how powerful the struggle over meaning and identity—and hence, schools, curricula, teaching, and evaluation—can be. While we should not want to emulate their often cynical and manipulative processes, the fact that they have had such success in pulling people under their ideological umbrella has much to teach us. Granted there are real differences in money and power between the

On Being a Scholar/Activist   11 forces of conservative modernization and those whose lives are being tragically altered by the policies and practices coming from the alliance. But, the Right wasn’t as powerful 30 years ago as it is now. It collectively organized. It created a decentered unity, one where each element sacrificed some of its particular agenda to push forward on those areas that bound them together. Can we not do the same? I believe that we can, but only if we face up to the realities and dynamics of power in unromantic ways. And this means not only critically analyzing the rightist agendas and the effects of their increasingly mistaken and arrogant policies in education and so much else, but engaging in serious criticism of some elements within the progressive and critical educational communities as well. Thus, as I argued in Educating the “Right” Way, the “romantic possibilitarian” rhetoric of a good deal of the writing on critical pedagogy is not sufficiently based on a tactical or strategic analysis of the current situation, nor is it sufficiently grounded in its understanding of the reconstructions of discourse and movements that are occurring in all too many places. The sometimes mostly rhetorical material of critical pedagogy simply is unable to cope with what has happened. Only when it is linked much more to concrete issues of educational policy and practice—and to the daily lives of educators, students, and community members— can it succeed. This, of course, is why journals such as Rethinking Schools and books such as Democratic Schools (Apple & Beane 1995, 2007) that connect critical educational theories and approaches to the actual ways in which they can be, and are, present in real classrooms become so important. Thus, while I may have been one of the originators of critical theory and critical pedagogy in the United States, I also have been one of its internal critics when it has forgotten what it is meant to do and has sometimes become simply an academic specialization at universities (see also Apple et al. 2009). The story of how the book I mentioned above, Democratic Schools (Apple & Beane 1995, 2007), came about may be a good way of showing what I mean here. This book is a response to one of the tasks of the “critical scholar/activist” that I develop in more recent books such as Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (Apple 2010b) and, in much greater detail, in my most recent book Can Education Change Society? (Apple 2013). Along with other people, I’ve argued that it is essential that critical educators do not ignore the question of practice. That is, we must find ways of speaking to (and learning from) people who now labor everyday in schools in worsening conditions which are made even worse by the merciless attacks from the Right. This means that rather than ignore “mainstream” organizations and publications, it’s important whenever possible to also occupy the spaces provided by existing “mainstream” publication outlets to publish books that provide critical answers to teachers’ questions about “What do I do on Monday?” during a conservative era. As I hinted at earlier, this space has too long been ignored by many theorists who are so interested in “purification” that they have not thought tactically enough, either about how one actually mobilizes people in education around issues of concern to practicing educators or about how much there is to learn from practicing educators about the possibilities and limits of educational actions within schools and communities. This is where Democratic Schools enters as an important success. One very large “professional” organization in the United States—the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)—publishes books that are distributed each year to

12   On Being a Scholar/Activist its more than 150,000 members, most of whom are teachers or administrators in elementary, middle, or secondary schools. At first I emphatically said “No”—not because I was against such a project, but because I believed quite strongly that the best people to do such a book would be those practicing critical teachers and administrators who were now engaged in doing what needed to be done “on Monday.” In essence, I felt that I should be their secretary, putting together a book based on their words, struggles, and accomplishments. If ASCD was willing for me to play the role of secretary, then I would do it. But I had one caveat. It had to be a truly honest book, one in which these critical educators could tell it as it really was. After intense negotiations that guaranteed an absence of censorship, I asked Jim Beane to work with me on Democratic Schools. Both of us were committed to writing a book that provided clear practical examples of the power of Freirian and similar critically democratic approaches at work in classrooms and communities. Democratic Schools was not only distributed to most of the 150,000 members of the organization, but it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of additional copies in many nations. Thus, a very large number of copies of a book that tells the practical stories of the largely successful struggles of critically-­oriented educators in real schools are now in the hands of educators who face similar problems daily. The publication and widespread distribution of Democratic Schools—and the publication and translation into multiple languages of the first and then the enlarged 2nd edition—provides one practical and strategic instance of making critical educational positions seem actually doable in “ordinary” institutions such as schools and local communities. Not unimportantly for me personally, it keeps me connected to the realities of curricula and teaching that sent me to TC in the first place. While material from Democratic Schools is not included in this book, in order to more fully understand both sides of me—the critical analyst and theorist, and the person who still grounds himself in the daily struggles to build more critically democratic curricula and teaching—it would be useful for the reader to read that work as well. It complements the account of my activity as a film-­maker with students and teachers found in Official Knowledge.

Learning from Others My understanding of these political and educational issues, of the dangers we now face, and of what can and must be done to deal with them, is grounded not only in my early political experiences, in the gritty realities of working with children in urban and rural schools, in the research I’ve carried out on what schools do and do not do in this society, or in my and Jim’s work with practicing educators on building more critical and democratic curricula and teaching strategies. It also has been profoundly affected by the extensive international work in which I have been fortunate to engage in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. For example, beginning in the mid-­1980s, I began to go to Brazil to work with the progressive Ministry of Education in the southern city of Porto Alegre and to give both academic and more popular lectures at universities and to teacher union groups. Most of my books had been translated there. Because of this, and because of similar theoretical and political tendencies in the work

On Being a Scholar/Activist   13 coming out of Brazil and my own, I developed close relationships with many politically active educators there. This also meant that I developed not only an ongoing relationship with activist educators and researchers in the Workers Party throughout Brazil, but just as importantly, an even closer relationship with the great Brazilian critical educator Paulo Freire grew as well. While I discuss this at greater length in Can Education Change Society?, oddly enough, unlike many critical educators in the United States, I actually had not been strongly influenced by Freire. While Freire’s arguments were indeed poetic and powerful, they had less of an impact on me. I had already been formed as a critical educator by the critical labor education and anti-­racist traditions in the United States, traditions that had very similar understandings and practices as those so brilliantly articulated by Freire in his books. As we became friends over the years, our conversations were less those of teacher and taught—although I respected him immensely. They were more those of comrades who often agreed but sometimes disagreed. For example, I believed that Freire was much too romantic about the question of content. He seemed to easily assume that, almost automatically, oppressed people would discover what was crucial to know. I wanted much more attention to be paid to the what of the curriculum. It was only later that I realized that my ongoing public and private discussions with Freire had indeed had a lasting effect on me (Apple 2013, 1999). These international connections were—and continue to be—crucial in the development of my work. Later on these were to be joined by intellectual and political connections in Japan, Korea, China, and elsewhere in Asia, in Spain, Portugal, Norway, and other nations in Europe, and especially in Latin America where my academic and political work in Brazil and then Argentina intensified. Thus, the international discussions, debates, and co-­teaching, and the academic and political activity in which I engaged in these nations, have always had a powerful impact on me and have led me to develop what I hope are more nuanced understandings both of the ways in which context and history matter and of the multiple kinds and forms of dominance and politics that exist. Thus, for example, I am now much better able to think through what roles different kinds of government/economy relations and histories (strong or weak, capitalist or state bureaucratic socialist, strong or weak labor movements) play. I also am now much more aware of how different traditions of religious impulses and movements, with their varying strengths and weaknesses, operate. Furthermore, the significance of histories of racial subjugation and gendered realities—and similar dynamics—are now clearer than they were before, something that provided an important part of my critical analyses of authoritarian populist religious movements in Educating the “Right” Way. Finally, I have come to have an immense amount of respect for the creative resiliency and political and educational courage of people in what we in the North somewhat arrogantly call the “Third World” (see, e.g., Apple 2010b; Apple & Buras 2006). Thus, words that we tend to treat as nouns—housing, food, education—I now, even more than earlier, very much recognize as verbs. They require constant effort, constant struggle and constant organized and personal action (Davis 2006). What this kind of understanding means for education and what we can learn from the ongoing struggles by oppressed groups and critical educators in many nations is, again, further developed in Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (Apple 2010b) and Can Education

14   On Being a Scholar/Activist Change Society? (Apple 2013), both of which focus not on rightist policies and the formation of common-­sense but on progressive possibilities and movements. Thus, these ongoing and deepening international relations and experiences provide some of the reasons why in these and other more recent books I have argued the North needs to be taught by the South (see Apple 2010b), with the development of the Citizen School and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, for example, being more than a little significant in this regard (Apple et al. 2003; Apple 2013). Similar things could be said about my involvement with the struggles of the once banned but now legal teachers union in Korea. I have been rather hesitant to tell the story of these personal activities, since I clearly am not alone in taking such risks and in engaging in serious political work inside and outside the United States. But in Can Education Change Society?, I use the story of my participation in these struggles and of my arrest in South Korea as a way of showing both the dangers and especially the progressive educational possibilities of such actions in identifiable emancipatory social movements.

Further Personal Reflections In the previous section of this introductory chapter, I tried to be honest about a number of the complex issues that I’ve attempted to understand and about how much I have learned from others internationally. Of course, no person, and certainly not me, can ever be fully aware of what drives her or his intellectual and political efforts. What I do know is that it is more than a little important for me to remember how my work was formed out of the time I spent teaching in one of the poorest communities in the United States and then in a very conservative rural area. I think that this has acted as a reality check, as did my role as a president of a teachers union. But this is not all. The fact that I had grown up poor, but in a strongly politically active family, was significant, as was my activity while still a teenager in anti-­racist mobilizations. That I am the father of a black child (see Apple 2000) is also crucial here, since the immense significance of the processes of racialization and minoritzation and the ongoing struggles against this have been all too visible. Being married to Rima D. Apple, the noted historian of medicine and of women’s health, for over four decades has also meant that I have been constantly taught about the lives of and politics surrounding women (see, e.g., Apple, R. D. 1987, 2006). Added to this were the years I spent working as a printer before, and then during, the time I went to night school for my initial college degree. Coming from a family of printers—that most radical bastion of working-­class struggles over literacy and culture—meant something. It demanded that literacy and the struggles over it were connected to differential power. Theory and research in education, hence, were supposed to do something about the conditions I and many other people had experienced. Because of this, this has also meant for me that—even with the attention my critical work has generated—I have never felt totally comfortable within the academy or with an academic life. Indeed, if I lose the discomfort, I fear I will lose myself. What does this mean to those people who still want to affix an easy label to me and my work? To be honest, I am not one who responds well to labels. As I noted, I am not in a church, so I am not worried about heresy. I am not simply a “neo-­Marxist,” a “sociologist,” a “critical curriculum scholar,” or someone in “critical theory” or ­“critical

On Being a Scholar/Activist   15 pedagogy.” Nor am I someone whose roots can be traced simply to something like “phenomenology meets Marxism,” although there is some truth to that in much of my earlier efforts. As I showed in the list of my early influences, a commitment to the arts—written, visual, and tactile—and to an embodied and culturally/politically critical aesthetic, have formed me in important ways as well. It may be useful to know in this regard that the “W” in Michael W. Apple stands for Whitman—the poet of the visceral and the popular, Walt Whitman, who like me came from New Jersey. Furthermore, as a film-­maker who works with teachers and children to create aesthetically and politically powerful visual forms, this kind of activity provides me with a sense of the importance of the very act of creation, of knowledge being something people can make, not simply “learn” (see Apple 2000). When I look back over the most recent books I’ve written at this stage of my career, it now seems that I am still dealing with the same questions about the relationship between culture and power, about the relationship among the economic, political, and cultural spheres, and about what all this means for educational work, with which I started more than four decades ago.6 And I am still trying to answer a question that was put so clearly by George Counts (1932) when he asked “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?” Counts was a person of his time and the ways he both asked and answered this question were a bit naïve. (Counts, of course, was not alone in asking this question. Indeed, as I demonstrate in much more detail in Can Education Change Society?, it was asked and answered in quite eloquent ways by many educators and public intellectuals within oppressed communities, both before and during the period in which Counts wrote his famous book.) But the tradition of radically interrogating schools, of asking who benefits from their dominant forms of curricula, teaching, and evaluation, of arguing about what they might do differently, and of asking searching questions of what would have to change in order for this to happen—all of this is what has worked through me and so many others throughout the history of the curriculum field and education in general. I stand on the shoulders of many others who have taken such issues seriously and hope to have contributed both to the recovery of the collective memory of this tradition and to pushing it further along conceptually, historically, empirically, and practically. If we think of democracy as a vast river, it increasingly seems to me that our task is to keep the river flowing, to remove the blockages that impede it, and to participate in expanding the river to be more inclusive so that it flows for everyone.

On This Collection The chapters in this book are largely from the books I have mentioned throughout this introductory essay, although a few are from elsewhere. They range from early work that was included in Ideology and Curriculum and Education and Power. They also include a selection of some of my more recent analyses on the ways we might understand rightist ideological transformations and why they have been successful. The book ends with a recent article on globalization, teacher education, and of the tasks of the public intellectual—what I call the critical scholar/activist. The latter issue, the role of the organic public intellectual and the history of how this role has been struggled with by such figures as Paulo Freire, George S. Counts, W.  E.  B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and others, is more fully developed in Can Education Change Society? (Apple 2013).

16   On Being a Scholar/Activist The chapters deal with many of the issues to which I have pointed in this introductory chapter. Among these are: the development of critical theories of knowledge and power; the necessity to move beyond reductive and essentializing approaches and to include a wider set of dynamics in order to better understand the intersections of and contradictions among class, gender, and race; the politics of language and the process of labeling; the content and form of the curriculum; the processes of deskilling and intensification in teachers’ work; the power of and contradictions within agency; the struggles over texts and official knowledge; the importance of the state and of politics in general; how rightist movements get formed and how they work; the conflicts over issues of “common culture” and a common curriculum; the power of conservative religious movements in education and the larger society; new forms of schooling such as homeschooling and their ideological and social bases; the effects of globalization and diasporic populations on our understanding of the politics of culture and the education of teachers; and finally, the responsibilities of being a critical scholar and activist educator. Because a number of the individual selections in this book were published as chapters in books taken from various periods of my writing, there may be occasional references in them to parts of the book from which they were taken. Thus, phrases such as “As I argued in Chapter x . . .” or “As I show in Chapter y . . .” may occasionally appear. In some of the material included in Knowledge, Power, and Education, there also may be references to articles in journals and chapters in edited books that I have written that are not in this book. Rather than rewrite the material published in this book, I have chosen to maintain both the content and the style found in its original. The material included in this collection represents only a portion of my efforts to understand the various currents in that river of democracy, the attempts by dominant groups to channel it in dangerous directions and to block its flow, and the various ways in which counter-­hegemonic movements can and do offer serious challenges to dominance. I would ask the reader to remember that this is indeed a selection. Because of this, by its very nature, this means that many arguments are noted but may be more fully developed elsewhere in articles, chapters, and other books that, for reasons of space, could not be represented here. The act of selecting from a much larger body of work is not easy. Indeed, it becomes an example of—drawing on Raymond Williams— what I have called the “selective tradition” in establishing the corpus of legitimate knowledge (see Williams 1961; Apple 1979/1990/2004). In books such as this, breadth must balance depth. What counts as “core” and what counts as “periphery” requires sometimes painful choices. However, I trust that what is included in this book is sufficient to give a clear sense of the kinds of issues with which I have dealt and why I and others believe that issues such as these deserve critical reflection and critical action if we are to continue the crucial struggle to create and defend an education worthy of its name.

Notes 1. If you have ever seen the popular film Lean On Me, the much romanticized account of how a principal supposedly changed a “failing” inner city school, this was based on Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey. This is the high school I attended and one of the schools in Paterson at which I taught. It may also be of some interest that during the Red Scare days in

On Being a Scholar/Activist   17 the 1950s, many of my family’s radical books and journals were wrapped in plastic and buried under a chicken coop at my grandfather’s small farm. The books were dug up during the time I was at Columbia and given to me as a gift, signifying that I was carrying on the family tradition. 2. I was what has been called a “red diaper baby,” the child of a communist mother and a socialist father. Needless to say, family discussions about politics were always “interesting.” 3. For more on my relationship with Huebner, see Apple (2010a). 4. Many of my books have gone through multiple editions, with revisions to the original arguments and the inclusion of what is often a good deal of additional material. I’ve employed the “/” symbol to indicate the varying dates of each edition, but the reader should understand that each edition may have very significant changes. When a new and expanded edition has been published by a different publisher, I have listed it separately. In addition, I have edited a large number of books in multiple languages that have also been important to the development of my arguments. But in the interests of space, I haven’t listed all of them here. 5. I need to acknowledge the strong influence of my wife, Rima D. Apple, here. Rima is an histor­ian of medicine and of women’s health. I owe her a good deal in terms of my understanding of the issues surrounding women’s lives and of the complexities of women’s agency and struggles. 6. For discussions of some of the best recent work on these issues from multiple critical traditions, see Apple et al. (2009) and Apple et al. (2010).

References Apple, M. W. (1979/1990/2004). Ideology and curriculum. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (Ed.) (1982). Cultural and economic reproduction in education. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1982/1995/2012). Education and power. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1993/2000). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (1996). Cultural politics and education: The John Dewey lectures. New York: Teachers College Press. Apple, M. W. (1999). Power, meaning, and identity. New York: Peter Lang. Apple, M. W. (2006a). Educating the “right” way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2006b). Rhetoric and reality in critical educational studies. British Journal of Sociology of Education 27: 679–687. Apple, M. W. (2008). Racisms, power, and contingency. Race, Ethnicity and Education 11: 329–336. Apple, M. W. (2010a). Fly and the fly bottle: On Dwayne Huebner, the uses of language, and the nature of the curriculum field. Curriculum Inquiry 40: 95–103. Apple, M. W. (Ed.) (2010b). Global crises, social justice, and education. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. (2013). Can education change society? New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.) (1995). Democratic schools. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Apple, M. W., & Beane, J. A. (Eds.) (2007). Democratic schools: Lessons in powerful education, 2nd edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Apple, M. W., & Buras, K. L. (Eds.) (2006). The subaltern speak: Curriculum, power, and educational struggles. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., & Weis, L. (Eds.) (1983). Ideology and practice in schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

18   On Being a Scholar/Activist Apple, M. W., & Whitty, G. (1999). Structuring the postmodern in education policy. In Hill, D., McLaren, P., Cole, M., & Rikowski, G. (Eds.) Postmodernism in educational theory: Education and the politics of human resistance (pp. 10–30). London: The Tufnell Press. Apple, M. W., Aasen, P., Cho, M. K., Gandin, L. A., Oliver, A., Sung, Y. K., Tavares, H., & Wong, T. H. (2003). The state and the politics of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., Au, W., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.) (2009). The Routledge international handbook of critical education. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W., Ball, S., & Gandin, L. A. (Eds.) (2010). The Routledge international handbook of the sociology of education. New York: Routledge. Apple, R. D. (1987). Mothers and medicine: A social history of infant feeding 1890–1950. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Apple, R. D. (2006). Perfect motherhood: Science and childrearing in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Counts, G. S. (1932). Dare the school build a new social order? New York: John Day. Dale, R. (1989/1990). The Thatcherite project in education. Critical Social Policy 9: 4–19. Dale, R., Esland, G., & MacDonald, M. (Eds.) (1976). Schooling and capitalism: A sociological reader. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and the Open University Press. Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. New York: Verso. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus. New York: Routledge. Gramsci, A. (1971). The prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Huebner, D. (1999). The lure of the transcendent. New York: Routledge. Morley, D., & Chen, K.-H. (Eds.) (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. New York: Routledge. Weis, L., McCarthy, C., & Dimitriadis, G. (Eds.) (2006). Ideology, curriculum, and the new sociology of education: Revisiting the work of Michael Apple. New York: Routledge. Williams, R. (1961). The long revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, M. F. D. (Ed.) (1971). Knowledge and Control. London: Collier Macmillan.

2 On Analyzing Hegemony

I  Introduction A few years ago I was asked to write a personal statement for a volume that was reprinting a number of my papers. In that piece, I tried to document the kinds of political and personal commitments that I felt provided an irreducible minimum set of tenets which guided my work as educator.1 In summary, I argued strongly that education was not a neutral enterprise, that by the very nature of the institution, the educator was involved, whether he or she was conscious of it or not, in a political act. I maintained that in the last analysis educators could not fully separate their educational activity from the unequally responsive institutional arrangements and the forms of consciousness that dominate advanced industrial economies like our own. Since writing that statement, the issues have become even more compelling to me. At the same time, I have hopefully made some progress in gaining a greater depth of understanding into this relationship between education and economic structure, into the linkages between knowledge and power. In essence, the problem has become more and more a structural issue for me. I have increasingly sought to ground it in a set of critical questions that are generated out of a tradition of neo-­Marxist argumentation, a tradition which seems to me to offer the most cogent framework for organizing one’s thinking and action about education. In broad outline, the approach I find most fruitful seeks to “explicate the manifest and latent or coded reflections of modes of material production, ideological values, class relations, and structures of social power—racial and sexual as well as politico-­ economic—on the state of consciousness of people in a precise historical or socio-­ economic situation.”2 That’s quite a lot for one sentence, I know. But the underlying problematic is rather complicated. It seeks to portray the concrete ways in which prevalent (and I would add, alienating) structural arrangements—the basic ways institutions, people, and modes of production, distribution, and consumption are organized and controlled—dominate cultural life. This includes such day-­to-day practices as schools and the teaching and curricula found within them.3 I find this of exceptional import when thinking about the relationships between the overt and covert knowledge taught in schools, the principles of selection and organization of that knowledge, and the criteria and modes of evaluation used to “measure success” in teaching. As Bernstein and Young, among others, have provocatively maintained, the structuring of knowledge and symbol in our educational institutions is

20   On Analyzing Hegemony i­ ntimately related to the principles of social and cultural control in a society.4 This is something on which I shall have more to say in a moment. Let me just state now that one of our basic problems as educators and as political beings, then, is to begin to grapple with ways of understanding how the kinds of cultural resources and symbols schools select and organize are dialectically related to the kinds of normative and conceptual consciousness “required” by a stratified society. Others, especially Bowles and Gintis,5 have focused on schools in a way which stresses the economic role of educational institutions. Mobility, selection, the reproduction of the division of labor, and other outcomes, hence, become the prime foci for their analysis. Conscious economic manipulation by those in power is often seen as a determining element. While this is certainly important, to say the least, it gives only one side of the picture. The economistic position provides a less adequate appraisal of the way these outcomes are created by the school. It cannot illuminate fully what the mechanisms of domination are and how they work in the day-­to-day activity of school life. Furthermore, we must complement an economic analysis with an approach that leans more heavily on a cultural and ideological orientation if we are completely to understand the complex ways social, economic, and political tensions and contradictions are “mediated” in the concrete practices of educators as they go about their business in schools. The focus, then, should also be on the ideological and cultural mediations which exist between the material conditions of an unequal society and the formation of the consciousness of the individuals in that society. Thus, I want here to look at the relationship between economic and cultural domination, at what we take as given, that seems to produce “naturally” some of the outcomes partly described by those who have focused on the political economy of education. On Analyzing Hegemony I think we are beginning to see more clearly a number of things that were much more cloudy before. As we learn to understand the way education acts in the economic sector of a society to reproduce important aspects of inequality,6 so too are we learning to unpack a second major sphere in which schooling operates. For not only is there economic property, there also seems to be symbolic property—cultural capital—which schools preserve and distribute. Thus, we can now begin to get a more thorough understanding of how institutions of cultural preservation and distribution like schools create and recreate forms of consciousness that enable social control to be maintained without the necessity of dominant groups having to resort to overt mechanisms of domination.7 Increasing our understanding of this recreation is at the heart of this volume. This is not an easy issue to deal with, of course. What I shall try to do in this introductory chapter is to portray, in rather broad strokes, the kinds of questions embodied in the approach and program of analysis which guides this book. In my discussion, I shall often draw upon the work of the social and cultural critic Raymond Williams. While he is not too well known among educators (and this is a distinct pity) his continuing work on the relationship between the control of the form and content of culture and the growth of the economic institutions and practices which surround us all can serve as a model, both personally and conceptually, for the kind of progressive arguments and commitments this approach entails.

On Analyzing Hegemony   21 There are three aspects of the program that need to be articulated at the beginning here: (1) the school as an institution, (2) the knowledge forms, and (3) the educator him or herself. Each of these must be situated within the larger nexus of relations of which it is a constitutive part. The key word here, obviously, is situated. Like the economic analysts such as Bowles and Gintis, by this I mean that, as far as is possible, we need to place the knowledge that we teach, the social relations that dominate classrooms, the school as a mechanism of cultural and economic preservation and distribution, and finally, ourselves as people who work in these institutions, back into the context in which they all reside. All of these things are subject to an interpretation of their respective places in a complex, stratified, and unequal society. However, we must be careful of misusing this tradition of interpretation. All too often, we forget the subtlety required to begin to unpack these relations. We situate the institution, the curriculum, and ourselves in an overly deterministic way. We say there is a one-­to-one correspondence between economics and consciousness, economic base “automatically” determining superstructure. This is too easy to say, unfortunately, and is much too mechanistic.8 For it forgets that there is, in fact, a dialectical relationship between culture and economics. It also presupposes an idea of conscious manipulation of schooling by a very small number of people with power. While this was and is sometimes the case—something I shall in fact document in Chapter 4’s treatment of some of the historical roots of the curriculum field—the problem is much more complex than that. Thus, in order to go further, we must first clarify what is meant by the notion that structural relations “determine” these three aspects of schools. As I shall argue, one of the keys to understanding this is the concept of hegemony. It is important to note that there are two traditions of using concepts such as “determine.” On the one hand, the notion of thought and culture being determined by social and economic structure has been used to imply what was mentioned a minute ago, a one-­to-one correspondence between social consciousness and, say, mode of production. Our social concepts, here, are totally prefigured or predicated upon a pre-­existing set of economic conditions that control cultural activity, including everything in schools. On the other hand, there is a somewhat more flexible position which speaks of determination as a complex nexus of relationships which, in their final moment, are economically rooted, that exert pressures and set limits on cultural practice, including schools.9 Thus, the cultural sphere is not a “mere reflection” of economic practices. Instead, the influence, the “reflection” or determination, is highly mediated by forms of human action. It is mediated by the specific activities, contradictions, and relationships among real men and women like ourselves—as they go about their day-­to-day lives in the institutions which organize these lives. The control of schools, knowledge and everyday life can be, and is, more subtle for it takes in even seemingly incon­ sequential moments. The control is vested in the constitutive principles, codes, and especially the commonsense consciousness and practices underlying our lives, as well as by overt economic division and manipulation. Raymond Williams’s discussion of hegemony, a concept most fully developed in the work of Antonio Gramsci, provides an excellent summary of these points.10 It is Gramsci’s great contribution to have emphasized hegemony, and also to have understood it at a depth which is, I think, rare. For hegemony supposes the

22   On Analyzing Hegemony existence of something which is truly total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural, like the weak sense of ideology, but which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which, as Gramsci put it, even constitutes the limit of commonsense for most people under its sway, that it corresponds to the reality of social experience very much more clearly than any notions derived from the formula of base and superstructure. For if ideology were merely some abstract imposed notion, if our social and political and cultural ideas and assumptions and habits were merely the result of specific manipulation, of a kind of overt training which might be simply ended or withdrawn, then the society would be very much easier to move and to change than in practice it has been or is. This notion of hegemony as deeply saturating the consciousness of a society seems to be fundamental. . . . [It] emphasizes the facts of domination. The crucial idea embedded in this passage is how hegemony acts to “saturate” our very consciousness, so that the educational, economic, and social world we see and interact with, and the commonsense interpretations we put on it, becomes the world tout court, the only world. Hence, hegemony refers not to congeries of meanings that reside at an abstract level somewhere at the “roof of our brain.” Rather, it refers to an organized assemblage of meanings and practices, the central, effective and dominant system of meanings, values and actions which are lived. It needs to be understood on a different level than “mere opinion” or “manipulation.” Williams makes this clear in his arguments concerning the relationship between hegemony and the control of cultural resources. At the same time, he points out how educational institutions may act in this process of saturation. I would like to quote one of his longer passages, one which I think begins to capture the complexity and one which goes beyond the idea that consciousness is only a mere reflection of economic structure, wholly determined by one class which consciously imposes it on another. At the same time the passage catches the crux of how the assemblage of meanings and practices still leads to, and comes from, unequal economic and cultural control.11 [Hegemony] is a whole body of practices and expectations; our assignments of energy, our ordinary understanding of man and his world. It is a set of meanings and values which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced [as a] reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of a society to move in most areas of their lives. But this is not, except in the operation of a moment of abstract analysis, a static system. On the contrary we can only understand an effective and dominant culture if we understand the real social process on which it depends: I mean the process of incorporation. The modes of incorporation are of great significance, and incidently in our kind of society have considerable economic significance. The educational institutions are usually the main agencies of transmission of an effective dominant culture, and this is now a major economic as well as cultural activity; indeed it is both in the same moment. Moreover, at a philosophical level, at the true level of theory and at the level of the history of various practices, there is a process which I call the selective tradition: that which, within the terms of an effective dominant

On Analyzing Hegemony   23 culture, is always passed off as “the tradition,” the significant past. But always the selectivity is the point; the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture. The process of education; the processes of a much wider social training within institutions like the family; the practical definitions and organization of work; the selective tradition at an intellectual and theoretical level: all these forces are involved in a continual making and remaking of an effective dominant culture, and on them, as experienced, as built into our living, reality depends. If what we learn were merely an imposed ideology, or if it were only the isolable meanings and practices of the ruling class, or of a section of the ruling class, which gets imposed on others, occupying merely the top of our minds, it would be—and one would be glad—a very much easier thing to overthrow. Notice what Williams is saying here about educational institutions. It is similar to the point I argued earlier about the possible relationship between the school as an institution and the recreation of inequality. Schools, in the words of the British sociologists of the curriculum, do not only “process people;” they “process knowledge” as well.12 They act as agents of cultural and ideological hegemony, in Williams’s words, as agents of selective tradition and of cultural “incorporation.” But as institutions they not only are one of the main agencies of distributing an effective dominant culture; among other institutions, and here some of the economic interpretations seem quite potent, they help create people (with the appropriate meanings and values) who see no other serious possibility to the economic and cultural assemblage now extant. This makes the concepts of ideology, hegemony, and selective tradition critical elements in the political and analytic underpinnings of the analyses found in this volume. For example, as I argue later, the issues surrounding the knowledge that is actually taught in schools, surrounding what is considered to be socially legitimate knowledge, are of no small moment in becoming aware of the school’s cultural, economic, and political position. Here, the basic act involves making the curriculum forms found in schools problematic so that their latent ideological content can be uncovered. Questions about the selective tradition such as the following need to be taken quite seriously. Whose knowledge is it? Who selected it? Why is it organized and taught in this way? To this particular group? The mere act of asking these questions is not sufficient, however. One is guided, as well, by attempting to link these investigations to competing conceptions of social and economic power and ideologies. In this way, one can begin to get a more concrete appraisal of the linkages between economic and political power and the knowledge made available (and not made available) to students.13 The movement, say, in social studies toward “process oriented” curriculum is a case in point. We teach social “inquiry” as a set of “skills,” as a series of methods that will enable students “to learn how to inquire themselves.” While this is certainly better than the more rote models of teaching which prevailed in previous decades, at the same time it can actually depoliticize the study of social life. We ask our students to see knowledge as a social construction, in the more disciplinary programs to see how

24   On Analyzing Hegemony s­ ociologists, historians, anthropologists, and others construct their theories and concepts. Yet, in so doing we do not enable them to inquire as to why a particular form of social collectivity exists, how it is maintained and who benefits from it. There exists in curriculum development, and in teaching, something of a failure of nerve. We are willing to prepare students to assume “some responsibility for their own learning.” Whether these goals are ever actually reached, given what Sarason14 has called the behavioral regularities of the institution, is interesting here, but not at issue. Just as important is the fact that what one is “critically reflecting” about is often vacuous, ahistorical, one-­sided, and ideologically laden. Thus, as I shall demonstrate in Chapter 5, for instance, the constitutive framework of most school curricula centers around consensus. There are few serious attempts at dealing with conflict (class conflict, scientific conflict, or other). Instead, one “inquires” into a consensus ideology that bears little resemblance to the complex nexus and contradictions surrounding the control and organization of social life. Hence, the selective tradition dictates that we do not teach, or will selectively reinterpret (and hence will soon forget), serious labor or woman’s history. Yet we do teach elite and military history. Whatever economics is taught is dominated by a perspective that grows out of the National Association of Manufacturers or its equivalent. And honest information about countries that have organized themselves about alternative social principles is hard to find. These are only a few examples of the role of school in creating a sense of false consensus, of course. Neutrality and Justice The very fact that we tend to reduce our understanding of the social and economic forces underlying our unequal society to a set of skills, to “how to’s,” mirrors a much larger issue. Let me precurse some of the arguments that I shall develop in greater detail in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. This reduction of understanding speaks to the technicization of life in advanced industrial economies. In Habermas’s terms, purposive-­ rational, or instrumental, forms of reasoning and action replace symbolic action systems. Political and economic, and even educational, debate among real people in their day-­to-day lives is replaced by considerations of efficiency, of technical skills. “Accountability” through behavioral analysis, systems management, and so on become hegemonic and ideological representations. And at the same time considerations of the justice of social life are progressively depoliticized and made into supposedly neutral puzzles that can be solved by the accumulation of neutral empirical facts,15 which when fed back into neutral institutions like schools can be guided by the neutral instrumentation of educators. The claim to neutrality is important in this representation, not merely in social life in general, but in education in particular. We assume that our activity is neutral, that by not taking a political stance we are being objective. This is significantly falsified, however, in two ways. First, there is an increasing accumulation of evidence that the institution of schooling itself is not a neutral enterprise in terms of its economic outcomes. As I shall note, as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and others have sought to show, and as the quotes from Williams have pointed to in this introductory chapter, while schools may in fact serve the interests of many individuals, and this should not be denied, at the same time, though, empirically they also seem to act as powerful

On Analyzing Hegemony   25 agents in the economic and cultural reproduction of class relations in a stratified society like our own. This is a rather involved issue, yet as will be discussed in the next section of this chapter and in Chapter 2, the literature on the role schools play in economic and cultural stratification is becoming increasingly impressive. Let me now note, actually reiterate, the second reason a claim to neutrality carries less weight than it might. The claim ignores the fact that the knowledge that now gets into schools is already a choice from a much larger universe of possible social knowledge and principles. It is a form of cultural capital that comes from somewhere, that often reflects the perspectives and beliefs of powerful segments of our social collectivity. In its very production and dissemination as a public and economic commodity—as books, films, materials, and so forth—it is repeatedly filtered through ideological and economic commitments. Social and economic values, hence, are already embedded in the design of the institutions we work in, in the “formal corpus of school knowledge” we preserve in our curricula, in our modes of teaching, and in our principles, standards, and forms of evaluation. Since these values now work through us, often unconsciously, the issue is not how to stand above the choice. Rather, it is in what values I must ultimately choose. But this brings to the fore another part of the problem as well—those deep-­seated values that already reside not at the top but at the very “bottom” of our heads that I mentioned before. The very categories we use to approach our responsibility to others, the commonsense or constitutive rules we employ to evaluate the social practices that dominate our society, are often at issue. Among the most critical of these categories are both our vision of “science” and, just as importantly, our commitment to the abstract individual. For it is the case that our sense of community is withered at its roots. We find ways of making the concrete individual into an abstraction and, at the same time, we divorce the individual from larger social movements which might give meaning to “individual” wants, needs, and visions of justice.16 This is strongly supported by the notion that curriculum research is a “neutral scientific activity” which does not tie us to others in important structural ways. Our inability to think in other than abstracted individualistic terms is nicely expressed once again by Raymond Williams in his argument that the dominance of the bourgeois individual distorts our understanding of our real social relations with and dependence on others.17 I remember a miner saying to me, of someone we were discussing: “He’s the sort of man who gets up in the morning and presses a switch and expects a light to come on.” We are all, to some extent, in this position, in that our modes of thinking habitually suppress large areas of our real relationships, including our real dependence on others. We think of my money, my light, in these naive terms, because parts of our very idea of society are withered at root. We can hardly have any conception, in our present system, of the financing of social purposes from the social product, a method which would continually show us, in real terms, what our society is and does. In a society whose products depend almost entirely on intricate and continuous cooperation and social organization, we expect to consume as if we were isolated individuals, making our own way. We are then  forced into the stupid comparison of individual consumption and social

26   On Analyzing Hegemony t­ axation—one desirable and to be extended, the other regrettably necessary and to be limited. From this kind of thinking, the physical unbalance follows inevitably. Unless we achieve some realistic sense of community, our true standard of living will continue to be distorted. . . . Questions not only of balance in the distribution of efforts and resources, but also of the effects of certain kinds of work both on users and producers, might then be adequately negotiated. . . . It is precisely the lack of an adequate sense of society that is crippling us. Williams’s points are many here, yet among them are the following. Our concern for the abstract individual in our social, economic, and educational life is exactly that—it is merely an abstraction. It does not situate the life of the individual (and ourselves as educators), as an economic and social being, back into the unequal structural relations that produced the comfort the individual enjoys. It can act as an ideological presupposition that keeps us from establishing any genuine sense of affiliation with those who produce our comforts, thus making it even more difficult to overcome the atrophication of collective commitment. Thus, the overemphasis on the individual in our educational, emotional, and social lives is ideally suited to both maintain a rather manipulative ethic of consumption and further the withering of political and economic sensitivity. The latent effects of both absolutizing the individual and defining our role as neutral technicians in the service of amelioration, therefore, makes it nearly impos­ sible for educators and others to develop a potent analysis of widespread social and economic injustice. It makes their curricular and teaching practices relatively impotent in exploring the nature of the social order of which they are a part. An exceptionally important element in this kind of argument is the idea of relation. What I am asking for is what might best be called “relational analyses.” It involves seeing social activity—with education as a particular form of that activity—as tied to the larger arrangement of institutions which apportion resources so that particular groups and classes have historically been helped while others have been less adequately treated. In essence, social action, cultural and educational events and artifacts (what Bourdieu would call cultural capital) are “defined” not by their obvious qualities that we can immediately see. Instead of this rather positivistic approach, things are given meaning relationally, by their complex ties and connections to how a society is organized and controlled. The relations themselves are the defining characteristics.18 Thus, to understand, say, the notions of science and the individual, as we employ them in education especially, we need to see them as primarily ideological and economic categories that are essential to both the production of agents to fill existing economic roles and the reproduction of dispositions and meanings in these agents that will “cause” them to accept these alienating roles without too much questioning.19 They become aspects of hegemony. In understanding these hegemonic relations we need to remember something which Gramsci maintained—that there are two requirements for ideological hegemony. It is not merely that our economic order “creates” categories and structures of feeling which saturate our everyday lives. Added to this must be a group of “intellectuals” who employ and give legitimacy to the categories, who make the ideological forms seem neutral.20 Thus, an examination of the very categories and procedures that “intellectuals” like educators employ needs to be one of the prime foci of our investigation.

On Analyzing Hegemony   27 So far I have looked rather broadly at what I perceive to be much of the reality behind schools as institutions, the knowledge forms we selectively preserve, reinterpret, and distribute, some of the categories we use to think about these things, and the role of the educator as “neutral” participant in the large-­scale results of schooling. There are still a few final comments to be said about that last aspect of the program and approach I am setting forth here though—the educator him or herself as political being. This is a very personal question, one that is by far the hardest. I am quite aware of the difficulty, in fact often the torture, that one must face in responding to or even adequately asking the question of “Where do I stand?” This kind of question already presupposes at least a beginning awareness of answers to my other queries about the relationship between cultural capital and economic and social control. It requires an analysis of what social and economic groups and classes seem to be helped by the way the institutions in our society are organized and controlled and which groups are not.21 The fact that this question is so hard to deal with, the helpless feeling we get when we ask it (what can I as one educator do now?) points to the utter importance of Gramsci’s and Williams’s arguments about the nature of hegemony. To hold our day-­to-day activities as educators up to political and economic scrutiny, to see the school as part of a system of mechanisms for cultural and economic reproduction, is not merely to challenge the prevailing practices of education. If it were “merely” this, then we could perhaps change these practices through teacher training, better curricula, and so on. These practices may need changes, of course, and there is still a place for such ameliorative reforms, some of which I shall propose later in the volume. But the kinds of critical scrutiny I have argued for challenges a whole assemblage of values and actions “outside” of the institution of schooling. And this is exactly the point, for if taken seriously, it must lead to a set of commitments that may be wholly different than those many of us commonsensically accept. It requires the progressive articulation of and commitment to a social order that has at its very foundation not the accumulation of goods, profits, and credentials, but the maximization of economic, social, and educational equality. All of this centers around a theory of social justice. My own inclination is to argue for something to the left of a Rawlsian stance. For a society to be just it must, as a matter of both principle and action, contribute most to the advantage of the least advantaged.22 That is, its structural relations must be such as to equalize not merely access to but actual control of cultural, social, and especially economic institutions.23 Now this would require more than mere tinkering with the social engine, for it implies a restructuring of institutions and a fundamental reshaping of the social contract that has supposedly bound us together. This theory of social justice which lies behind such a program needs to be generated out of more than personal ideology. It has its basis in a number of empirical claims as well. For example, the gap between rich and poor in advanced corporate nations is increasing. The distribution and control of health, nutritional, and educational goods and services is basically unequal in these same industrialized nations.24 Economic and cultural power is being increasingly centralized in massive corporate bodies that are less than responsive to social needs other than profit. After some initial gains, the relative progress of women and many minority groups is either stagnant or slowly atrophying. Because of these and other reasons, I am more and more convinced that these conditions are “naturally” generated out of a particular

28   On Analyzing Hegemony social order. As I shall document in this volume, our educational dilemmas, the unequal achievement, the unequal returns, the selective tradition and incorporation, are also “naturally” generated out of this social arrangement. It may be the case that these institutions are organized and controlled in such a way as to require rather large-­ scale changes in their relationships if progress is to be made in eliminating any of these conditions. I realize that this is rather controversial, to say the least. Nor do I expect that everyone will accept all that I have written here. However, I did not first come to the position that our educational issues are at root ethical, economic, and political and then search for documentation of it. Rather, and this is important, I have been convinced by evidence available to all of us if we are willing to search and to question, if we can learn to analyze hegemony. In fact this is part of the program I would like to explicate here. One thing should be clear, this program requires a good deal of plain old hard “intellectual” work, as well. It involves more than a modicum of reading, study, and honest debate in areas many of us have only a limited background in. We are unused to looking at educational activity ethically, politically, and economically, not to say critically, given the very difficult (and time-­consuming and emotionally draining) nature of being a decent educator. This task is made even more difficult because of what might be called the politics of knowledge distribution. That is, the kinds of tools and frameworks I have noted here are not readily distributed by the prevailing institutions of cultural preservation and distribution like schools and mass media. These critical traditions are themselves victims of selective tradition. If my arguments here and elsewhere in this volume about the nature of whose knowledge gets into schools are correct, this may be unfortunate but it is to be expected. However, if we do not take it upon ourselves to master these traditions, to relearn them, we ignore the fact that the kinds of institutional and cultural arrangements which control us were built by us. They can be rebuilt as well. I have argued so far that any serious appraisal of the role of education in a complex society must have as a major part of its program at least three elements. It needs to situate the knowledge, the school, and the educator him or herself within the real social conditions which “determine” these elements. I have also argued that this act of situating needs to be guided by a vision of social and economic justice if it is to be meaningful. Hence, I have also maintained that the position of educator is neutral neither in the forms of cultural capital distributed and employed by schools nor in the economic and cultural outcomes of the schooling enterprise itself. These issues are best analyzed through the concepts of hegemony, ideology, and selective tradition, and can only be fully understood through a relational analysis. As was mentioned, however, there is an evolving tradition of educational scholarship that wants to take this program of relational analysis seriously. Let us now look at it and what this volume examines in somewhat more detail.

II  Educational Scholarship and the Act of “Situating” In his preface to the English translation of Karl Mannheim’s classic work, Ideology and Utopia, Louis Wirth states that “The most important things . . . we can know about a man is what he takes for granted, and the most elemental and important facts about a

On Analyzing Hegemony   29 society are those that are seldom debated and generally regarded as settled.”25 That is, to gain insight, to understand, the activity of men and women of a specific historical period, one must start out by questioning what to them is unquestionable. As Marx would say, one does not accept the illusions of an epoch, the participants’ own commonsense appraisals of their intellectual and programmatic activities (though these are important to be sure); rather, the investigator must situate these activities in a larger arena of economic, ideological, and social conflict. As I noted, education as a field of study does not have a strong tradition of such “situating.” In fact, if one were to point to one of the most neglected areas of educational scholarship, it would be just this, the critical study of the relationship between ideologies and educational thought and practice, the study of the range of seemingly commonsense assumptions that guide our overly technically minded field. Such critical scholarship would lay bare the political, social, ethical, and economic interests and commitments that are uncritically accepted as “the way life really is” in our day-­to-day life as educators. The study of the interconnections between ideology and curriculum and between ideology and educational argumentation has important implications for the curriculum field and for educational theory and policy in general. For as I shall argue throughout this volume, we need to examine critically not just “how a student acquires more knowledge” (the dominant question in our efficiency minded field), but “why and how particular aspects of the collective culture are presented in school as objective, factual knowledge.” How, concretely, may official knowledge represent ideological configurations of the dominant interests in a society? How do schools legitimate these limited and partial standards of knowing as unquestioned truths? These questions must be asked of at least three areas of school life: (1) how the basic day-to-day regularities of schools contribute to students learning these ideologies; (2) how the specific forms of curricular knowledge both in the past and now reflect these configurations; and (3) how these ideologies are reflected in the fundamental perspectives educators themselves employ to order, guide, and give meaning to their own activity. The first of these questions refers to the hidden curriculum in schools—the tacit teaching to students of norms, values, and dispositions that goes on simply by their living in and coping with the institutional expectations and routines of schools day in and day out for a number of years. The second question asks us to make educational knowledge itself problematic, to pay much greater attention to the “stuff ” of curriculum, where knowledge comes from, whose knowledge it is, what social groups it supports, and so on. The final query seeks to make educators more aware of the ideological and epistemological commitments they tacitly accept and promote by using certain models and traditions—say, a vulgar positivism, systems management, structural-­ functionalism, a process of social labeling, or behavior modification—in their own work. Without an understanding of these aspects of school life, one that connects them seriously to the distribution, quality, and control of work, power, ideology, and cultural knowledge outside of our educational institutions, educational theory and policy making may have less of an impact than we might hope. To be sure, there is a growing number of current examples of this act of situating, of placing educational argumentation and techniques in a larger, more comprehensive context. Certain historians of education such as Katz, Karier, Kaestle, Feinberg, and

30   On Analyzing Hegemony others have given us pictures of the relationship between, say, bureaucratic, economic, and ideological interests and schooling that are less self-­congratulatory than some of our previously accepted notions of our past. Added to this are the current analyses of both the political economy of education and the possibilities of educational reform done by Bowles and Gintis, Carnoy and Levin, and others. Less familiar perhaps, though equally as important, have been the relatively recent sociological investigations of the ties between school knowledge and such interests. All of these studies are guided, either tacitly or quite overtly, by the belief that a more thorough and honest appraisal of educational issues can be gained by placing them within a framework of competing conceptions of justice, of social and economic equality, and of what is and who should have legitimate power. For example, in a recent critical analysis of the sociology of education, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality, Philip Wexler calls for a thoroughgoing reorientation of sociological research into schools.26 Drawing upon some of the current European and American work on the relationship between ideology and curriculum, and between schools and the creation of inequality, he points out that to understand fully how schools function we must study schools as institutions that “process knowledge,” as institutions that serve an ideological function. The sociology of education is to become the sociology of school knowledge, in large part. Curriculum scholarship, sociological understanding, and the study of political and economic ideologies, hence, merge into a unified perspective that enables us to delve into the place of schools in the cultural, as well as economic, reproduction of class relations in advanced industrial society. Wexler’s perception is quite provocative for a number of reasons. It sees social and educational research as a political act in large measure, something I will discuss in somewhat greater depth later in this volume. It also asks us to focus on the knowledge and symbols schools and other cultural institutions overtly and covertly give legitimacy to. This is not to neglect the fact that schools, as the old saw goes, do not merely “teach knowledge,” but they also “teach children.” Rather, it calls for an understanding of how the kinds of symbols schools organize and select are dialectically related to how particular types of students are organized and selected, and ultimately stratified economically and socially. And all of this is encompassed by a concern for power. Who has it? Do certain aspects of schooling—the organization and selection of culture and people (for that is what schools in fact do)—contribute to a more equitable distribution of power and economic resources or do they preserve existing inequalities? Whatever answer one gives to these questions, to understand how schools do this it is essential that one do two things. First, one must see how schools operate first hand. The researcher must comprehend how the day-­to-day regularities of “teaching and learning in schools” produce these results. Second, one must have that peculiarly Marxist sensitivity to the present as history, to see the historical roots and conflicts which caused these institutions to be what they are today. Without this dual understanding, it is that much more difficult to comprehend completely the economic and cultural “functions” of our educational institutions. One way to think about culture in society is to employ a metaphor of distribution. That is, one can think about knowledge as being unevenly distributed among social and economic classes, occupational groups, different age groups, and groups of different power. Thus, some groups have access to knowledge distributed to them and not

On Analyzing Hegemony   31 distributed to others. The obverse of this is also probably true. The lack of certain kinds of knowledge—where your particular group stands in the complex process of cultural preservation and distribution—is related, no doubt, to the absence in that group of certain kinds of political and economic power in society. This relationship between cultural distribution and the distribution and control of economic and political potency—or more clearly, the relationship between knowledge and power—is admittedly quite difficult to understand. Yet an understanding of how the control of cultural institutions enhances the power of particular classes to control others can provide needed insight into the way the distribution of culture is related to the presence or absence of power in social groups. Many, if not most, educators are somewhat unfamiliar with this problem. We have tended to perceive knowledge as a relatively neutral “artifact.” We have made of it a psychological “object” or a psychological “process” (which it is in part, of course). In so doing, however, we have nearly totally depoliticized the culture that schools distribute. Yet there is a growing body of curriculum scholars and sociologists of education who are taking much more seriously the questions of “whose culture?,” “What social group’s knowledge?,” and “In whose interest is certain knowledge (facts, skills, and propensities and dispositions) taught in cultural institutions like schools?” As I have noted elsewhere27 the best examples of this work are found in some recent volumes from England. Among them are Michael F. D. Young, ed., Knowledge and Control, Richard Brown, ed., Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change, Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions, Michael Flude and John Ahier, eds, Educability, Schools and Ideology and Rachel Sharp and Anthony Green, Education and Social Control.28 The research program of these volumes and the perspective I am articulating here has been influenced by Raymond Williams’s assertion that education is not a product like bread or cards, but must be seen as a selection and organization from all available social knowledge at a particular time. Since this selection and organization involves conscious and unconscious social and ideological choices, then a primary task of the curriculum scholarship is that of relating these principles of knowledge selection and organization to their institutional and interactional setting in schools, and then to the wider arena of institutional structures that surround classrooms.29 These points mean a number of things when they are applied to what has increasingly been called the sociology of school knowledge. It means that for methodological reasons one does not take for granted that curricular knowledge is neutral. Instead, one looks for social interests embodied in the knowledge form itself. The points also imply that one must study the curriculum in use within schools. Instead of input–output studies of school achievement, the researcher needs to “live” in classrooms, to see the complex forms of interaction that occur in classrooms. In this way, more accurate pictures can be got of which particular “kinds” of students “get” what particular kinds of knowledge and dispositions. This makes analyses of the labeling process in schools of particular importance, obviously. Furthermore, one can see how knowledge is actually created and used in school settings. Finally, the tacit teaching of a less overt, hidden curriculum can be documented. All of these data are important to our understanding of the kinds of and ways schools act to distribute both popular and elite culture. Yet, in order to take Williams’s

32   On Analyzing Hegemony argument most seriously a further step must be taken. The researcher must think structurally or relationally. He or she must link this process of cultural distribution back to questions of power and control outside the school. Now this brings political and economic elements into the heart of educational investigation. This is a rather significant break with past moments of social and educational scholarship, most of which (inaccurately) argued that their underlying position was apolitical and bore no relationship to how power and resources were distributed in society. In fact, while I shall explore this in greater detail in Chapter 2, the general position being argued by those people concerned with, say, cultural reproduction and economic reproduction is that research into school knowledge, and more general forms of educational research, is at least tacitly a political act. However, at the same time that they argue for political commitment, they want to argue against one particular political affiliation that has come to dominate educational policy and curriculum discourse, that of the liberal tradition. Actually, some of the similarities among those individuals concerned with a more critical appraisal of the school as a reproductive force can be seen in just this, their treatment of liberal educational theory, with its reliance on science, neutrality, and education as a form of social amelioration. As Feinberg notes, for example, one major weakness of liberal theory arises from its inability to see events as signs of serious structural issues. It turns educational concerns into administrative “problems” rather than instances of economic, ethical, and political conflict.30 Though there are differences among them, those people who, like myself, have sought to situate school phenomena within their social and economic context seem to agree on one important thing. Most major aspects of a liberal view of both society and education need to be questioned. While this view is certainly neither homogeneous nor unitary, nor is it the only basis upon which educational and curricular policy is generated, liberalism as a form of social amelioration is focused upon because its “assumptions and dimensions have penetrated patterns of educational practice more decisively than any other ideology.”31 Liberal educational policy—with its ethic of individual achievement based supposedly on merit—is seen as a language of justification, as an ideological form, rather than a fully accurate description of how education functions. While it does describe certain aspects of schooling (certain individuals and groups do achieve well in school), it fails to see the connection between, say, the “production” of certain kinds of people and knowledge on the one hand and the reproduction of an unequal society which establishes the roles for which these agents are produced on the other hand. But what is it exactly that is being questioned?32 Perhaps the most single most important plank of the liberal ideology of education is that education creates and sustains social change. This faith rests on a number of critical assumptions. . . . The first is that schooling critically affects the level of economic growth and progress through its link with technology. The level of technological growth is taken to determine the level of economic growth and is itself seen to be dependent on the level of schooling. The educational system provides personnel both to push back the frontiers of technical knowledge and to consolidate these advances and bring them into our everyday lives. Through manpower planning, the apparent imperatives of the technical production process

On Analyzing Hegemony   33 exert pressure upon the school system to produce a diversely skilled and qualified work force. The expansion and differentiation of educational institutions is underpinned by a belief in the supportive role education can play in technological growth, and this has led not only to the rapid growth of higher education in the 1960’s but also to the continuing stress on technical and business education. The second assumption involves a view of education as capable of redressing social inequalities, of overcoming—through the equalization of educational opportunity—the unfair distribution of life chances. The education system is seen as providing a ladder and an avenue for social mobility, implementing objective selection procedures for the establishment of a meritocracy, in which the only qualification for personal advancement is “ability.” The education system becomes the key mechanism of social selection, to the benefit of both society and the individual. Finally, education and the culture it both produces and transmits are viewed as independent and autonomous features in our society. Educational policies are directed towards the production of both knowledge and knowledgeable individuals through the sponsoring of academic research and curriculum reform. The idealism within the liberal tradition presents both culture and schooling as politically neutral forces for social change. In contradistinction to this set of assumptions about education and its relation to a social order, the cultural and educational apparatus are interpreted as elements in a theory of social control by those individuals who are concerned with cultural and economic reproduction.33 Hence, challenges are made to at least three interrelated notions: that the selection processes are neutral; that “ability” (rather than the socialization of students to socially and economically related norms and values) is what schools actually do focus on; and whether the schools are actually organized to teach technical curricular skills and information to all students so that each person has an equal chance at economic rewards. Thus, as one instance, as people such as Bowles and Gintis have pointed out and as I shall argue later on, schools may not be geared to select and produce neutrally a “diversely skilled and qualified work force.” Rather they seem to be less concerned with the distribution of skills than they are with the distribution of norms and dispositions which are suitable to one’s place in a hierarchical society. But we must be quite careful here not to overstate this case in too deterministic a way, for not all of these liberal assumptions are totally incorrect. As I shall show in Chapter 2, for instance, education is linked to technical growth, but in a more complex and ultimately less just and equitable way than we might commonsensically think. For this very linkage between technical knowledge and schooling helps generate, not reduce, inequality. Taken together, though, these kinds of criticisms that are marshalled against the liberal tradition provide the underlying framework for a more critical analysis of schooling and the conventional “wisdom” that guides it. They all involve the claim that a good deal of curricular and more general educational theory has acted as a set of ideological blinders that prevents a more serious and searching inquiry into both the unequal institutional structures of American society and the relationship between the school and these structures.

34   On Analyzing Hegemony Yet how can something that seeks so fervently to help—as liberal educational theory and practice so clearly seek to do—be an ideological form that covers the reality of domination? After all, very few educators set out to do less than provide services for their clientele. Can their motives, their actions, be so ideologically laden? In order to unpack this problem, the very notion of ideology is significant here and requires some further treatment. On the Nature of Ideology What ideology means is problematic usually. Most people seem to agree that one can talk about ideology as referring to some sort of “system” of ideas, beliefs, fundamental commitments, or values about social reality, but here the agreement ends.34 The interpretations differ according to both the scope or range of the phenomena which are presumably ideological and the function—what ideologies actually do for the people who “have” them. Interpretations of the scope of ideology vary widely. The phenomena under it can be grouped into at least three categories: (1) quite specific rationalizations or justifications of the activities of particular and identifiable occupational groups (e.g., professional ideologies); (2) broader political programs and social movements; and (3) comprehensive world-­views, outlooks, or what Berger and Luckmann and others have called symbolic universes. Functionally, ideology has been evaluated historically as a form of false consciousness which distorts one’s picture of social reality and serves the interests of the dominant classes in a society. However, it has also been treated, as Geertz puts it, as “systems of interacting symbols” that provide the primary ways of making “otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful,”35 that is, as inevitable creations that are essential and function as shared conventions of meaning for making a complex social reality understandable. These distinctions about the function of ideology are, of course, no more than ideal types, poles between which fall most positions on the question of what ideology is and what it does. Both ideal typical positions do grow from traditions, though, and have their modern proponents. The former, what has been called the “interest theory” of ideology, rooted as it is in the Marxist tradition, perceives ideology’s primary role as the justification of vested interests of existing or contending political, economic, or other groups. The latter pole, the tradition of “strain theory,” with Durkheim and Parsons as its more well-­known proponents, most often takes as ideology’s most important function its role of providing meaning in problematic situations, as giving a usable “definition of the situation,” if you will, in this way making it possible for individuals and groups to act. Even with these rather divergent orientations, there seems to be some common ground among those concerned with the problem of ideology in that ideology is usually taken to have three distinctive features. It always deals with legitimation, power conflict, and a special style of argument. McClure and Fischer describe each of these characteristics quite clearly.36 (1) Legitimation—Sociologists seem to agree that ideology is concerned with legitimation—the justification of group action and its social acceptance. This holds

On Analyzing Hegemony   35 whether writers speak of rationalization of vested interests, attempts to “maintain a particular social role,” or justificatory, apologetic . . . activity concerned with the establishment and defense of patterns of belief. In each case, writers treat as a primary issue the legitimation of how an activity is socially organized. . . . When the basic assumptions underlying a social arrangement seem to be seriously challenged, the resulting need for legitimation may well take the form of concern with the sacred . . . “Ideology seeks to sanctify existence by bringing it under the dominion of the ultimately right principles.” (2) Power Conflict—All of the sociological literature links ideology to conflicts between people seeking or holding power. But some writers have in mind power, or politics, in a narrower sense, and others in a wider sense. In the narrower sense, these terms refer to a society’s formal distribution of authority and resources which by and large takes place within one realm—the sphere of politics. In a broader sense, power and politics involve any sphere of activity, and all of its aspects that deal with the allocation of rewards. . . . Power conflict is always at stake in ideological disputes, whether or not those involved expressly acknowledge that dimension. (3) Style of Argument—Many writers note that quite a special rhetoric, and a heightened affect, mark the argumentation that takes place in the realm of ideology. . . . The rhetoric is seen to be highly explicit and relatively systematic. . . . At least two reasons may account for the distinctive rhetoric. First, the fundamental importance of the assumptions at issue to the very survival of a group creates a strain toward more articulate explication of assumptions which mark the group alone, in order to reinforce solidarity and agreement among its members. Conversely, there would seem to be a tendency to articulate the assumptions which are shared—or which are compatible—with those contained in rival thought systems. In this case, explicitness is a tactic which seeks to persuade, to mobilize support, or to convert outsiders. Second, any explication of the assumptions and ideas implicit in a mode of organizing activity is likely to disguise the vague quality of these assumptions and ideas when they are used in practice. These varied characteristics of ideology have important implications for analysis of both liberal theory and of education as a hegemonic form, for we shall have reason to see how the language and world-­view of science, efficiency, “helping,” and the abstracted individual perform these ideological functions for the curriculum field shortly. One can see from this relatively brief discussion, though, that ideology cannot be treated as a simple phenomenon. Nor can it be employed merely as a bludgeon with which one hits an opponent over the head (Aha, your thought is no more than ideology and can be ignored) without losing something in the process. Rather, any serious treatment of ideology has to contend with both its scope and its function, with its dual role as a set of rules that give meaning and its rhetorical potency in arguments over power and resources.37 For example, in later chapters I shall examine the role played by the dominant models of management, evaluation, and research in curriculum. I shall explore how each of them seems to help give meaning to, helps organize, our activity as educators in ways we tend to think are both basically economically and culturally neutral and helpful, how these dominant models and traditions serve rhetorical functions by giving

36   On Analyzing Hegemony funding agencies and “the public” a vision of our seeming sophistication, and, finally, how these models at the same time disguise the real values, interests, and social functioning which underpin them. Both scope and function will have to be joined here to make headway. Again, the most helpful way of thinking through the complex characteristics, the scope and varied functions, of ideology is found in the concept of hegemony. The idea that ideological saturation permeates our lived experience enables one to see how people can employ frameworks which both assist them in organizing their world and enable them to believe they are neutral participants in the neutral instrumentation of schooling (as we shall see much of the language employed by educators in fact does), while at the same time, these frameworks serve particular economic and ideological interests which are hidden from them. As Wexler noted, in order to see how this happens we shall have to weave curricular, socio-­political, economic, and ethical ana­ lyses together in such a way as to show the subtle connections which exist between educational activity and these interests. In the chapters that follow, I shall begin this task by examining in greater detail the three major areas of inquiry that I argued in the second section of this preliminary chapter were essential to a complete understanding of the relationship between ideology and school experience. These were: (1) the basic regularities of school experience and what covert ideological teaching goes on because of them; (2) what ideological commitments are embedded within the overt curriculum; and (3) the ideological, ethical, and valuative underpinnings of the ways we ordinarily think about, plan, and evaluate these experiences. The chapters will proceed in a somewhat dialectical fashion—when necessary reiterating and making more subtle certain critical arguments, building upon previous ones, and at times offering concrete suggestions for action on the part of educators. The latter point, the offering of concrete suggestions, illuminates a contradiction in this volume of which I am only too well aware. By the very fact that I write this book as an educator speaking to other educators, and no doubt to a group of interested social scientists, policy analysts, and philosophers as well, I am aware of being caught. For while a person engages in serious critical analysis, he or she still may have an ethical obligation to make life more livable, more poetic and meaningful, for the students who live in the institutions I analyze here. Thus, there are ameliorative reforms incorpor­ ated throughout this volume. Some of them are concerned with student rights, others concerned with the use of more ethical and politically conscious modes of curriculum research, and still others which suggest more honest forms of curriculum. These are given cautiously, almost reluctantly, though they are also important tactically. For action on them can lead to clarification of the real possibilities of altering aspects of school life and, perhaps most importantly, a need for further, more structurally oriented, collective action. Yet, they are also given in the hope that other educators will travel the path that has taken me, personally, from a concern for ethical and poetic understanding in curriculum to what is hopefully the beginnings of a more mature search for a just social order that will enable such understanding to be a constitutive part of our experience once again. As the table of contents briefly indicates, the chapters which follow cover the relationship between, on the one hand, ideology, politics, and economics and, on the

On Analyzing Hegemony   37 other hand, both the overt and hidden curriculum, and dominant educational theories. The first major area or issue (how the basic regularities or hidden curriculum of schools represent and teach ideological configurations) is dealt with within Chapters 2, 3, and 5. The second area (the relationship between ideology and overt curricular knowledge itself ) is analyzed in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5. The final issue (how ideological, political, ethical, and economic commitments are reflected in our theories and ameliorative policies and practices) is examined in four chapters, 4, 6, 7, and 8. In this way, the reader is given a fairly thorough opportunity to see how the larger society has a major impact on such things as educational theories, the apparent and not so apparent knowledge that schools teach, and the modes of evaluation and amelioration that schools employ. We shall first examine the school’s role in the creation and recreation of hegemony in students. Once this is clear, then we shall examine how hegemony operates “in the heads” of “intellectuals” like educators. The individual chapters will go about these tasks in the following ways: Chapter 2, “Ideology and Cultural and Economic Reproduction,” provides greater depth in the traditions which now dominate curriculum discourse. It focuses more clearly on the sociology and economics of curriculum by analyzing the role of the curriculum in the interplay between cultural and economic reproduction. The chapter will explore the linkages between access to and the lack of distribution of “legitimate” knowledge and the recreation of cultural and economic inequality by examining some of the role of schooling in technical growth. Chapter 3, “Economics and Control in Everyday School Life” (with Nancy King), looks at the other side of the coin. By focusing on the social relations and informal curricula, as well as the formal curricula of schooling, it illuminates the ideological or hegemonic teaching that goes on simply by students living in schooling for extended periods of time. The chapter has two elements. It provides a brief historical analysis of how certain kinds of school knowledge with an avowed interest in social control became the underlying framework for organizing day-­to-day school life. Second, it offers empirical evidence of kindergarten experience to document the role of the school in teaching economic and ideological knowledge and dispositions that have quite conservative outcomes. Chapter 4, “Curricular History and Social Control” (with Barry Franklin) seeks to take seriously the importance of having a “sensitivity to the present as history” by further investigating the ways in which these conservative traditions, especially a commitment to consensus and like-­mindedness, entered the field. This chapter continues and considerably deepens the brief historical examination done in the previous section of the book. It probes into the roots of the concrete social and economic forces and commitments that provided the ideological context for the selection of the principles and practices that still dominate the curriculum field and education in general. Chapter 5, “The Hidden Curriculum and the Nature of Conflict,” will examine the social interests still embodied in the dominant forms of curricular knowledge found in schools today, interests which mirror a number of the ideological presuppositions analyzed in Chapter 4. It analyzes overt knowledge in the widely accepted curriculum proposals and material in science and social studies, paying particular attention again to the ideology of consensus that pervades school knowledge and to the lack of distribution of

38   On Analyzing Hegemony more politically powerful curricular knowledge. It is a study in how the selective tradition operates to maintain an effective dominant culture. Chapter 6, “Systems Management and the Ideology of Control,” turns our inquiry toward how hegemony operates at the bottom of educators’ heads by delving into the role of management ideologies in organizing schools and selecting curricular knowledge. It points out both their essential lack of ethical, social, and economic neutrality and their use as mechanisms of political quiescence, consensus, and social control. Chapter 7, “Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling,” continues the investigation into the ideological saturation of educators’ consciousness. It focuses on how the cultural capital of dominant groups results in the employment of categories which “blame the victim,” the child, rather than the school or society which generates the material conditions for failure and success. It documents how, through a complex process of social labeling, schools play a fundamental role in distributing different kinds of knowledge and dispositions to different kinds and classes of people. This chapter analyzes the way school labels act and how they are generated out of ideological presuppositions. It presents a neo-­Marxist analytic framework for linking together school knowledge, labels, and the institutions that surround the school by showing how deviance, “achievement problems,” and so on are “naturally generated” out of the everyday functioning of the institution. Chapter 8, “Beyond Ideological Reproduction,” attempts to clarify the roles—political as well as educational—that might be played if we are to counter some of the cultural and economic forces analyzed in this volume. It points again to the importance of understanding the complex interrelationships that exist between schools and aspects of cultural as well as economic reproduction for adequate action to be taken. The chapter suggests a number of paths for further research into the problem of the sociology and economics of school knowledge. It concludes with a redefinition of the educator, one which is not based on the understandings generated from the role of abstract individual, but one which is rooted instead in the definition of an organic intellectual whose understanding and action are joined by active involvement against hegemony. Let us continue with the quest for just such an adequate understanding now.

Notes   1. Michael W. Apple, “Personal Statement,” Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1975), pp. 89–93.   2. Donald Lazere, “Mass Culture, Political Consciousness, and English Studies,” College English, XXXVIII (April 1977), 755.   3. Ibid.   4. See, for example, Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 158.   5. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).   6. The research on this is described rather clearly in Caroline Hodges Persell, Education and Inequality (New York: Free Press, 1977).   7. Roger Dale et al., eds, Schooling and Capitalism: A Sociological Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 3.   8. See the analysis of Althusser’s notion of “overdetermination” in Miriam Glucksmann, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).

On Analyzing Hegemony   39   9. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” Schooling and Capitalism, Roger Dale et al., eds, op. cit., p. 202. 10. Ibid., pp. 204–205. 11. Ibid., p. 205. 12. See, for example, Michael F. D. Young, ed., Knowledge and Control (London: Collier-­ Macmillan, 1971). 13. Michael W. Apple, “Power and School Knowledge,” The Review of Education III (January/ February, 1977), 26–49, and Chapters 2 and 3 below. 14. Seymour Sarason, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971). 15. Trent Schroyer’s account of this process is helpful here. See his The Critique of Domination (New York: George Braziller, 1973). 16. Part of what follows here appears in expanded form in Michael W. Apple, “Humanism and the Politics of Educational Argumentation,” Humanistic Education: Visions and Realities, Richard Weller, ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1977), pp. 315–330. 17. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 298–300. 18. Apple, “Power and School Knowledge,” op. cit. 19. Ian Hextall and Madan Sarup, “School Knowledge, Evaluation and Alienation,” Society, State and Schooling, Michael Young and Geoff Whitty, eds (Guildford, England: Falmer Press, 1977), pp. 151–171. 20. Carl Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976), p.  9 and Persell, op. cit., pp. 7–11. 21. See Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968). See also the exemplary analysis in Vicente Navarro, Medicine Under Capitalism (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976). 22. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). 23. For an interesting discussion of the debate in education over the social principle of equality of opportunity, see Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of Twentieth Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley, 1975). See also, the articles on worker control of the workplace that have appeared in Working Papers for a New Society over the past few years. 24. Navarro, op. cit. 25. Louis Wirth, “Preface” to Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), pp. xxii–xxiii. 26. Philip Wexler, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1976). 27. Michael W. Apple, “Curriculum as Ideological Selection,” Comparative Education Review, XX (June, 1976), 209–215, and Michael W. Apple and Philip Wexler, “Cultural Capital and Educational Transmissions,” Educational Theory, XXVII (Winter, 1978). 28. Michael F. D. Young, ed., Knowledge and Control (London: Collier-­Macmillan, 1971), Richard Brown, ed., Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change (London: Tavistock, 1973), Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (2nd edn: London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), Michael Flude and John Ahier, eds, Educability, Schools and Ideology (London: Halstead, 1974), and Rachel Sharp and Anthony Green, Education and Social Control: A Study in Progressive Primary Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). A review of much of this work can be found in John Eggleston, The Sociology of the School Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 29. Young, op. cit., p. 24. 30. Feinberg, op. cit., p. vii. 31. Roger Dale et al., op. cit., p. 1. 32. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 33. Ibid., p. 2. 34. In the examination that follows, I am drawing upon the excellent treatment of ideology by Helen M. McClure and George Fischer, “Ideology and Opinion Making: General Problems

40   On Analyzing Hegemony of Analysis” (New York: Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, July, 1969, mimeographed). 35. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” Ideology and Discontent, David Apter, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 47–76. 36. McClure and Fischer, op. cit., pp. 7–10. 37. For further discussion of the problem of ideology, one of the more analytically interesting treatments can be found in Nigel Harris, Beliefs in Society: The Problem of Ideology (London: C. A. Watts, 1968).

3 Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling

“There’s the King’s messenger,” said the Queen. “He’s in prison now, being punished; and the trial doesn’t even begin ’til next Wednesday; and of course the crime comes last of all.” “Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice. That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said, as she turned the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon. Alice felt there was no denying that. “Of course it would be all the better,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.” “You’re wrong there, at any rate,” said the Queen. “Were you ever punished?” “Only for faults,” said Alice. “And you were all the better for it, I know!” the Queen said triumphantly. “Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,” said Alice, “That makes all the difference.” “But if you hadn’t done them,” the Queen said, “that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Ethics, Ideology, and Theory Drawing upon the important work of both Williams and Gramsci, I argued at the very beginning of this book that control and domination are often vested in the commonsense practices and consciousness underlying our lives as well as by overt economic and political manipulation. Domination can be ideological as well as material. Systems management and behavioral objectives are not the only examples of the saturation of educational thought by ideological configurations. While such educational procedures do perform the dual roles of an effective ideology—by giving “adequate” definitions of situations and serving the interests of those who already possess economic and cultural capital today—they are linked to other aspects of our conceptual apparatus to form a larger taken for granted perspective that dominates education. For to challenge the use of systems management procedures and the like means that one must also raise questions about the very categories we employ to organize our thinking and action in cultural and economic institutions like schools. Therefore, in this chapter I shall examine how these commonsense categories we use to think through the very basis of what we are about and the modes of amelioration which stem from them are also aspects of the larger hegemonic configuration of an effective dominant culture.

42   Commonsense Categories The last chapter pointed to the importance of analyzing the ethical and ideological dimensions of our accepted ways of viewing students, noting that the two are considerably intertwined. This needs to be examined further. As I maintained, educational questions are, at least partly, moral questions. For one thing they assume choices as to the relevant realms of expertise educators should use to comprehend children and schools. As Blum puts it, “All inquiry [and especially educational inquiry I might add] displays a moral commitment in that it makes reference to an authoritative election concerning how a phenomenon ought to be understood.”1 Furthermore, if conceptions of “the moral” concern questions of oughtness or goodness, then it should be clear that educational questions are moral questions on this criterion as well. Finally, by the very fact that school people influence students, their acts cannot be interpreted fully without the use of an ethical rubric. However, there are a number of factors that cause educators to perceive their problems in ways significantly different from this. Because this causal nexus is exceptionally complex, this chapter cannot hope to explore all aspects of the difficulty. To do so would require an extensive investigation of the relationship between science, ideology, and educational thought2 and a fuller analysis of the reduction of conceptions of humans and institutions to technical considerations in advanced industrial and especially corporate societies.3 Hopefully, like the other chapters in this volume, this one will serve as a stimulus for further inquiry into these areas and especially into the ways by which school people pass over the ethical and, as we shall see, political and economic implications of their acts. While part of my analysis will be more theoretic than, say, the earlier chapters on the hidden and overt curriculum in that it will continue the investigation of how hegemony operates in the heads of intellectuals like educators, its implications for the day to day density of classroom life are exceptionally important. I am using the idea of a theoretic investigation in a rather specific way in this particular aspect of my analysis, as a mode of standing back from the ideological categories and commonsense assumptions which underpin the curriculum field. Part of this type of orientation has been noted most clearly by Douglas in his statement concerning the differences between a naturalistic and a theoretical stance. He puts it this way:4 There are different ways to make use of common-­sense experience. . . . There is, especially, a fundamental distinction between taking the natural (or naturalistic) stance and taking the theoretic stance, as the phenomenological philosophers have long called them. Taking the natural stance consists primarily in taking the standpoint of common-­sense, of acting within common-­sense, whereas taking the theoretic stance consists in standing back from common-­sense and studying common-­sense to determine its nature. That is, for Douglas and myself, one must bracket any commitment to the utility of employing our taken for granted perspectives so that these commonsense presuppositions themselves can become subject to investigation. In this way our commonsense presuppositions can be used as data to focus upon the latent significance of much that we unquestioningly do in schools. This is particularly important because they provide the basic logic which organizes our activity and often act as tacit guidelines for determining the success or failure of our educational procedures.

Commonsense Categories   43 It is not the case, however, that these ideological configurations have been constructed consciously. The very fact that they are hegemonic, and are aspects of our “whole body of practices, expectations, and ordinary understanding,” makes them even more difficult to deal with. They are difficult to question, that is, because they rest upon assumptions that are unarticulated and that seem essential in making some headway in education. But other things contribute to the lack of critical insight. In the field of education these configurations are academically and socially respectable and are supported by the prestige of a process that “shows every sign of being valid scholarship, complete with tables of numbers, copious footnotes, and scientific terminology.” Furthermore, the altruistic and humanitarian elements of these positions are quite evident, so it is hard to conceive of them as principally functioning to detract from our ability to solve social or educational problems.5 However, an investigation into the history of many ameliorative reform movements that were supported by research and perspectives similar to those we will continue to consider here documents the rather interesting fact that often the ameliorative reforms had quite problematic results. Frequently they ultimately even ended up harming the individuals upon whom they focused. Platt’s treatment of the reform of the juvenile justice system in the latter part of the last century is instructive here. In attempting to create more humane conditions for “wayward” youth, these reforms created a new category of deviance called “juvenile delinquency” and in the long run served to abridge the civil and constitutional rights of youth.6 In many ways, we have yet to recover from these “reforms.” As I shall argue in this chapter many of the seemingly ameliorative reforms school people propose in schools, and the assumptions that lie behind them, have the same effect—ultimately harming rather than helping, clouding over basic issues and value conflicts rather than contributing to our ability to face them honestly. This is especially the case in the major topic of this chapter, the process of using expert (and “scientific”) clinical, psychological, and therapeutic perspectives, evaluations, and labels in schools. These forms of language and the perspectives they embody may be interpreted not as liberal “helping” devices, but more critically as mechanisms by which schools engage in anonymizing and sorting out abstract individuals into preordained social, economic, and educational slots. The labeling process, thus, tends to function as a form of social control,7 a “worthy” successor to that long line of mechanisms in schools that sought to homogenize social reality, to eliminate disparate perceptions, and to use supposedly therapeutic means to create moral, valuative, and intellectual consensus.8 The fact that this process can be deadening, that the cultural capital of those in power is employed as if it were natural, thus enhancing both false consensus and economic and cultural control, that it results in the elimination of diversity, that it ignores the importance of conflict and surprise in human interaction is too often lost in the background in our rush to “help.” There is nothing very odd about the fact that we usually do not focus on the basic sets of assumptions which we use. First, they are normally known only tacitly, remain unspoken, and are very difficult to formulate explicitly. Second, these basic rules are so much a part of us that they do not have to be expressed. By the very fact that they are shared assumptions, the product of specific groups of people, and are commonly accepted by most educators (if not most people in general), they only become problematic when an individual violates them or else when a previously routine situation

44   Commonsense Categories becomes significantly altered.9 However, if we are to be true to the demands of rigorous analysis, it is a critical inquiry into just such things as the routine grounds of our day to day experience that is demanded.

On the Necessity of Critical Awareness The curriculum field, and education as a whole, has been quite ameliorative in its orientation. This is understandable given the liberal ideology which guides most educational activity and given the pressures on and interest by the field to serve schools and their ongoing programs and concerns. The marked absorption in amelioration has had some rather detrimental effects, however. Not only has it caused us to ignore questions and research that might contribute in the long run to our basic understanding of the process of schooling,10 but such an orientation neglects the crucial role critical reflection must play if a field is to remain vital. A critically reflective mode is important for a number of reasons. First, curriculists help establish and maintain institutions that affect students and others in a myriad of ways. Because of these effects, they must be aware of the reasons and intentions that guide them. This is especially true of ideological and political purposes, both manifest and latent.11 As I have demonstrated throughout this volume, since schools as institutions are so interconnected with other political and economic institutions which dominate a collectivity and since schools often unquestioningly act to distribute knowledge and values through both the overt and hidden curriculum that often act to support these same institutions, it is a necessity for educators to engage in searching analyses of the ways in which they allow values and commitments to unconsciously work through them. Second, it is important to argue that the very activity of rational investigation requires a critical style. The curriculum field has been much too accepting of forms of thought that do not do justice to the complexity of inquiry and thus it has not really changed its basic perspective for decades. It has been taken with the notions of systematicity, certainly, and control as the ideals of programmatic and conceptual activity, in its treatment of research and people. This is strongly mirrored in the behavioral objective movement and in the quest for taxonomies which codify “cognitive,” “affective,” and “psychomotor” behavior. These activities find their basis in a conception of rationality that is less than efficacious today. Not only is it somewhat limiting,12 but it also is historically and empirically inaccurate. Our taken for granted view posits a conception of rationality based upon ordering beliefs and concepts in tidy logical structures and upon the extant intellectual paradigms which seem to dominate the field of curriculum at a given time. Yet, any serious conception of rationality must be concerned not with the specific intellectual positions a professional group or individual employs at any given time, but instead with the conditions on which and the manner in which this field of study is prepared to criticize and change those accepted doctrines.13 In this way, intellectual flux, not “intellectual immutability,” is the expected and normal occurrence. What has to be explained is not why we should change our basic conceptual structure, but rather the stability or crystallization of the forms of thought a field has employed over time.14 The crystallization and lack of change of fundamental perspectives is not a new problem in the curriculum field by any means. In fact, a major effort was made in the

Commonsense Categories   45 1940s to identify and deal with just such a concern.15 The fact that many curriculum specialists are unaware of the very real traditions of grappling with the field’s tendency toward hardening its positions obviously points to the necessity of greater attention being given to historical scholarship in the curriculum field. This intellectual conservatism often coheres with a social conservatism as well. It is not the case that a critical perspective is “merely” important for illuminating the stagnation of the curriculum field. What is even more crucial is the fact that means must be found to illuminate the concrete ways in which the curriculum field supports the widespread interests in technical control of human activity, in rationalizing, manipulating, “incorporating,” and bureaucratizing individual and collective action, and in eliminating personal style and political diversity. These are interests that dominate advanced corporate societies and they contribute quite a bit to the suffering of minor­ ities and women, the alienation of youth, the malaise and meaninglessness of work for a large proportion of the population, and the increasing sense of powerlessness and cynicism that seem to dominate our society. Curriculists and other educators need to be aware of all of these outcomes, yet there is little in-­depth analysis into the role our commonsense thought plays in causing us to be relatively impotent in the face of these problems. While educators consistently attempt to portray themselves as being “scientific,” by referring to the “scientific” (or technical) and therefore neutral status of their activity to give it legitimacy, they are ignoring the fact that a good deal of social science research is currently being strongly criticized for its support of bureaucratized assumptions and institutions that deny dignity and significant choice to individuals and groups of people. This criticism cannot be shunted aside easily by educators, for unlike many other people, their activity has a direct influence on the present and future of masses of children. By being the primary institution through which individuals pass to become “competent” adults, schools give children little choice about the means by which they are distributed into certain roles in society. As we have and shall see, “neutral scientific” terminology acts as a veneer to cover this fact, and, thus, becomes more ideological than helpful.16 Perhaps one of the fundamental reasons the field has stagnated both socially and intellectually involves our lack of concern for less positivistic scholarship, a lack of concern that mirrors the positivistic ideal taught to students. We have been less than open to forms of analysis that would effectively counterbalance our use of rubrics embodying the interests of technical and social control and certainty. This lack of openness has caused us to be inattentive to the functions of the very language systems we employ and has led us to disregard fields whose potency lies in their concern for a critical perspective. This will require a closer examination.

Are Things as They Seem? Let us focus first on the linguistic tools we employ to talk about “students” in schools. My basic point will be that much of our language, while seemingly neutral, is not neutral in its impact nor is it unbiased in regard to existing institutions of schooling. An underlying thesis of this argument is that our accepted faith that the extension of “neutral techniques of science and technology” will provide solutions to all of the

46   Commonsense Categories dilemmas we confront is misplaced and that such a faith tends to obscure the fact that much of educational research serves and justifies already existing technical, cultural, and economic control systems that accept the distribution of power in American society as given.17 Much of the discussion here will be stimulated by insights derived from recent “critical theory” and neo-­Marxist scholarship, particularly the potent notion that our basic perspectives often hide our “real” relationships with other persons with whom we have real and symbolic contact. The analysis will employ arguments from research on the process of labeling to bring this initial point home. An analysis of the process of labeling is of considerable import here for labeling is the end project of our modes of placing value on our own and students’ actions. It is directly related to the principles which stand behind the practices we engage in to differentiate students according to their “ability” and their possession of particular kinds of cultural capital. Thus, as Ian Hextall has argued:18 The differentiation, . . . grading [and evaluation] we accomplish in schools is articulated with the broader, more encompassing social division of labor. This is not to claim that there exists a direct one-­to-one link between differentiation in education and, say, the occupational division of labor. Clearly, such an assumption would be mechanistic and facile. But by our [evaluation] activities we are helping to establish the general framework of the labor force which the market later refines into specific occupational categories. In this way the procedures that occur in schools are part of the political-­economic context within which the schools are located. The differentiations, evaluations, and judgements of worth which are made in schools are tenaciously related to particular forms of the social division of labor. Thus, since one quite significant means by which pupils are culturally and economically stratified is through the application of values and categories to them, it is critical that we examine these commonsense social principles and values. In order to do this, we need to remember that certain types of cultural capital—types of performance, knowledge, dispositions, achievements, and propensities—are not necessarily good in and of themselves. Rather, they are made so because of specific taken for granted assumptions. They are often historically and ideologically “conditioned.” The categories that we employ to think through what we are doing with students, their and our success and failure, are involved in a process of social valuing. The guiding principles that we use to plan, order, and evaluate our activity—conceptions of achievement, of success and failure, of good and bad students—are social and economic constructs. They do not automatically inhere within individuals or groups. Instead, they are instances of the application of identifiable social rules about what is to be considered good or bad performance.19 Hence, the very ways we talk about students provide excellent instances of the mechanisms through which dominant ideologies operate. And the recent investigations of the critical theorists, when used critically, can be quite helpful in unpacking these mechanisms. The word “critically” is of considerable moment here. There are dangers in employing critical theory itself uncritically, especially since it has tended to become increasingly isolated from the study of political economy that so nicely complements it. With these dangers in mind, however, I do want to employ some aspects of the program of

Commonsense Categories   47 critical theory as modes of disclosing the ways the consciousness of intellectuals functions. At the same time, though, we need to remember that just as an overly deterministic and economistic position, by treating schools as black boxes, is too limited a program to understand how schools create what the political economists want to analyze, so too are there significant limitations in any totally “cultural” analysis.20 Rather, the two must be integrated to fully explain the roles schools play in the cultural and economic reproduction of class relations. Thus, the combination of selected portions of the cultural program of the critical theorists (their focus on the control of language and consciousness, for example) with the more specific economic theories of recent Marxist interpretations of schools (the ways schools assist in the “allocation” of students to their proper positions in the larger society, for instance) may provide some insight into how educational institutions help create the conditions which support this system of economic allocations. Before proceeding, however, it would be wise to examine some possible explanations of why such critical Marxist understanding has had less than a major impact on our commonsense thought. This is odd since it is considered exceptionally powerful in other fields and on the European continent where it has made quite an impact on French and German philosophical and sociological thought, for example, and on the political and economic practice of large groups of people.21 There are a number of reasons why reconstructed Marxist scholarship has not found a serious place in Anglo-­Western educational investigation. While, historically, orthodox Marxism had an effect in the 1930s on such educators as Counts and others, it lost its potency due to the political situation evolving later, especially the repressive political climate that we have not totally overcome. To this problem, of course, can be added the overly deterministic and dogmatic interpretations of applying Marxist analysis by even many later “Marxists.” Part of the problem of applying critical insights to advanced industrial societies like our own is to free these insights from their embeddedness in such dogmatism.22 It should not have to be said, but unfortunately it must, that the rigidly controlled nature of a number of modern societies bears little relation to the uniquely cogent analyses found in the Marxist tradition itself. Our neglect of this scholarly tradition says more about the fear laden past of American society than it does about the merits of the (all too often unexplored) tradition of critical analysis. It also speaks eloquently to the point I mentioned early in this volume. The tradition itself has become an example of how the selective tradition operates. It has become a victim of the politics of knowledge distribution in that we have forgotten our past roots in these concerns. Yet, there are other more basic and less overtly political explanations for the atrophy and lack of acceptance of a Marxist intellectual and political tradition in places like the USA. The atomistic, positivistic, and strict empiricist frame of mind so prevalent in our thought (and quite effectively taught, as we saw in Chapter 5) has difficulty with the critically oriented notion of the necessity of a plurality of, and conflict about, ways of looking at the world. On this, critical scholarship holds a position quite similar to that of phenomenology in that the “truth” of something can only be seen through the use of the totality of perspectives one can bring to bear upon it. (Though obviously some are more basic than others in that subtle economic, class, and cultural interpretations take on an organizing function in the questions one asks in this critical tradition.)23

48   Commonsense Categories Also, the tendency in western industrialized societies to separate strictly value from fact would make it difficult for there to be acceptance of a position which holds that most social and intellectual categories are themselves valuative in nature and may reflect ideological commitments, a fact that will be of exceptional import in this discussion. Furthermore, the long tradition of abstract individualism and a strongly utilitarian frame of mind would no doubt cause one to look less than positively upon both a more social conception of “man” and an ideal commitment that is less apt to be immediately ameliorative and more apt to raise basic questions about the very framework of social and cultural life that is accepted as given by a society.24 In opposition to the atomistic assumptions that predominate in our commonsense thought, as we have seen a critical viewpoint usually sees any object “relationally.” This is an important key to understanding the type of analysis one might engage in from such a perspective. This implies two things. First, any subject matter under investigation must be seen in relation to its historical roots—how it evolved, from what conditions it arose, etc.—and its latent contradictions and tendencies in the future. This is the case because in the highly complicated world of critical analysis existing structures are actually in something like continual motion. Contradiction, change, and development are the norm and any institutional structure is “merely” a stage in process.25 Thus, institutional reification becomes problematic, as do the patterns of thought that support this lack of institutional change. Second, anything being examined is defined not only by its obvious characteristics, but by its less overt ties to other factors. It is these ties or relationships that make the subject what it is and give it its primary meanings.26 In this way, our ability to illuminate the interdependence and interaction of factors is considerably expanded. To accept this relational view is obviously to go against our traditional concept that what we see is as it appears. In fact, the argument is that our very taken for granted perceptions mislead us here and that this is a rather grave limitation on our thought and action. That is, anything is a good deal more than it appears, especially when one is dealing with complex and interrelated institutions including the school.27 It is this very point that will enable us to make progress in even further uncovering some of the ideological functions of educational language. One final point can be made. Historically, critical theory and a good deal of neo-­ Marxist analysis have been reduced to variants of pragmatism, especially by individuals like Sidney Hook and others. While I do not wish to debunk the pragmatic tradition in American education (after all, we still have much to learn from a serious treatment of Dewey’s analysis of means and ends in education, for instance), I do want to caution against interpreting critical analysis so that it easily fits within our taken for granted constitutive rules. To do so is to lose the potential of a critical perspective in going beyond some of the very-­real conformist inclinations of pragmatism. The pragmatic position tends to ignore the possibility that some theories must contradict the present reality and, in fact, must consistently work against it.28 These critical inquiries stand in witness of the negativity involved in all too many current institutional (economic, cultural, educational, political) arrangements and thus can illuminate the possibility of significant change. In this way, the act of criticism contributes to emancipation in that it shows the way linguistic or social institutions have been reified or thingified so that educators and the public at large have forgotten why they evolved, and that people made them and thus can change them.29

Commonsense Categories   49 The intent of such a critique and of critical scholarship in general, then, is twofold. First, it aims at illuminating the tendencies for unwarranted and often unconscious domination, alienation, and repression within certain existing cultural, political, educational, and economic institutions. Second, through exploring the negative effects and contradictions of much that unquestioningly goes on in these institutions, it seeks to “promote conscious [individual and collective] emancipatory activity.”30 That is, it examines what is supposed to be happening in, say, schools if one takes the language and slogans of many school people seriously; and it then shows how these things actually work in a manner that is destructive of ethical rationality and personal political and institutional power. Once this actual functioning is held up to scrutiny, it attempts to point to concrete activity that will lead to challenging this taken for granted activity.

Institutional Language and Ethical Responsibility One of the most potent issues raised by critical scholarship over the years is the tendency for us to hide what are profound interrelations between persons through the use of a “neutral” commodity language.31 Williams’s earlier discussion of the ideological function of the abstract individual obviously points to part of this problem. Educators are not immune to this tendency. That is, educators have developed categories and modes of perception which reify or thingify individuals so that they (the educators) can confront students as institutional abstractions rather than as concrete persons with whom they have real ties in the process of cultural and economic reproduction. Given the complexity of mass education this is understandable. However, the implications of the growth of this form of language are profound and must be examined in depth. In order to accomplish this, one fact must be made clear. By the very fact that the categories that curriculum workers and other educators employ are themselves social constructs, they also imply the notion of the power of one group to “impose” these social constructions on others. For example, the categories by which we differentiate “smart” children from “stupid,” “academic” areas from “non-­academic,” “play” activity from “learning” or “work” activity, and even “students” from “teachers,” are all commonsense constructions which grow out of the nature of existing institutions.32 As such they must be treated as historically conditioned data, not absolutes. This is not to say that they are necessarily always wrong; rather it points to the necessity of understanding them for what they are—categories that developed out of specific social and historical situations which conform to a specific framework of assumptions and institutions, the use of which categories brings with it the logic of the institutional assumptions as well. As I mentioned, the field itself has a tendency to “disguise” relations between people as relations between things or abstractions.33 Hence, ethical issues such as the profoundly difficult problem concerning the ways by which one person may seek to influence another are not usually treated as important considerations. It is here that the abstract categories that grow out of institutional life become quite serious. If an educator may define another as a “slow learner,” a “discipline problem,” or other general category, he or she may prescribe general “treatments” that are seemingly neutral and helpful. However, by the very fact that the categories themselves are based upon institutionally defined abstractions (the commonsense equivalent of statistical averages),

50   Commonsense Categories the educator is freed from the more difficult task of examining the institutional and economic context that caused these abstract labels to be placed upon a concrete individual in the first place. Thus, the understandable attempt to reduce complexity leads to the use of “average treatments” applied to fillers of abstract roles. This preserves the anonymity of the intersubjective relationship between “educator” and “pupil” which is so essential if institutional definitions of situations are to prevail. It, thereby, protects both the existing institution and the educator from self-­doubt and from the innocence and reality of the child. This has important implications for educational scholarship. By using official categories and constructs such as those defined by and growing out of existing institutional practices—examples might be studies of the “slow learner,” “discipline problems,” and “remediation”—curriculum researchers may be lending the rhetorical prestige of science to what may be questionable practices of an educational bureaucracy34 and a stratified economic system. That is, there is no rigorous attempt at examining institutional culpability. The notion of imputing culpability is of considerable moment to my analysis. Scott makes this point rather clearly in his discussion of the effects of labeling someone as different or deviant.35 Another reaction that commonly occurs when a deviant label is applied is that within the community a feeling arises that “something ought to be done about him.” Perhaps the most important fact about this reaction in our society is that almost all of the steps that are taken are directed solely at the deviant. Punishment, rehabilitation, therapy, coercion, and other common mechanisms of social control are things that are done to him, implying that the causes of deviance reside within the person to whom the label has been attached, and that the solutions to the problems that he presents can be achieved by doing something to him. This is a curious fact, particularly when we examine it against the background of social science research on deviance that so clearly points to the crucial role played by ordinary people in determining who is labeled a deviant and how a deviant behaves. This research suggests that none of the corrective measures that are taken can possibly succeed in the intended way unless they are directed at those who confer deviant labels as well as those to whom they are applied. [my italics] In clearer language, in the school students are the persons expressly focused upon. Attention is primarily paid to their specific behavioral, emotional, or educational “problems,” and, thus, there is a strong inclination to divert attention both from the inadequacies of the educational institution itself36 and what bureaucratic, cultural, and economic conditions caused the necessity of applying these constructs originally. Let us now look a bit more deeply into the ideological and ethical configuration surrounding the idea of culpability. It is often the case that institutional labels, especially those that imply some sort of deviance, “slow learner,” “discipline problem,” “poor reader,” etc., may again serve as types found in educational settings—confer an inferior status on those so labeled. This is shot through with moral meanings and significance. Usually the “deviant” label has an essentializing quality in that a person’s (here, a student’s) entire relationship to an institution is conditioned by the category applied to him. He or she is this and only this. The point is similar to Goffman’s argument that

Commonsense Categories   51 the person to whom a deviant label is applied by others or by an institution is usually viewed as morally inferior, and his or her “condition” or behavior is quite often interpreted as evidence of his or her “moral culpability.”37 Thus, such labels are not neutral, at least not in their significance for the person. By the very fact that the labels are tinged with moral significance—not only is the child different but also inferior—their application has a profound impact. The fact that these labels once conferred are lasting due to the budgetary and bureaucratic reality of many schools—budgetary restrictions, the very real structural relations existing between schooling and economic and cultural control, lack of expertise in dealing with the “learning problems” of specific students, etc., all making it truly difficult to actually change the conditions which caused the child to be “a slow learner” or other category in the first place—gives even more weight to the points I have been illuminating. Since only rarely is a student reclassified,38 the effect of these labels is immense for they call forth forms of “treatment” which tend to confirm the person in the institutionally applied category. It is often argued that such rhetorical devices as the categories and labels to which I have been referring actually are used to help the child. After all, once so characterized the student can be given “proper treatment.” However, just as plausible a case can be made that, given the reality of life in schools, and given the role of the school in maximizing the production both of certain kinds of cultural capital and of agents who are “required” by a society’s economic apparatus, the very definition of a student as someone in need of this particular treatment harms him or her.39 As I have pointed out, such definitions are essentializing; they tend to be generalized to all situations which the individual confronts. As Goffman so potently illustrates, in total institutions—and schools share many of their characteristics—the label and all that goes with it is likely to be used by the individual’s peers and his or her custodians (e.g., other children, teachers, and administrators) to define him or her. It governs nearly all of the conduct toward the person, and, more importantly, the definition ultimately governs the student’s conduct toward these others, thereby acting to support a self-­fulfilling prophecy.40 My point is not to deny that within the existing institutional framework of schooling there are such “things” as “slow learners,” “underachievers,” or “poorly motivated students” which we can commonsensically identify, though as I have contended such language hides the more basic issue of inquiring into the conditions under which one group of people consistently labels others as deviant or applies some other taken for granted abstract category to them. Rather, I would like to argue that this linguistic system as it is commonly applied by school people does not serve a psychological or scientific function as much as they would like to suppose. To put it bluntly, it often serves to abase and degrade those individuals and classes of people to whom the designations are so quickly given.41 A fact that should bring this argument into even clearer focus—that is, that the process of classification as it functions in educational research and practice is a moral and political act, not a neutral helping act—is the evidence that those labels are massively applied to the children of the poor and ethnic minorities much more so than the children of the more economically advantaged and politically powerful. Besides the historical documentation I offered in Chapter 4, there is powerful recent empirical evidence to support part of the argument offered here. For example, Mercer’s

52   Commonsense Categories analysis of the processes by which institutions like schools label individuals as, say, mentally retarded confirms this picture.42 Children with “nonmodal” socio-­cultural backgrounds and of minority groups predominate to a disproportionate degree in being so labeled. This is primarily due to diagnostic procedures in schools that were drawn almost totally from what she has called the dominance of “anglocentrism” in schools, a form of ethno-­centrism that causes school people to act as if their own group’s life style, language, history, and value and normative structure were the “proper” guidelines against which all other people’s activity should be measured. Not only were students from low socio-­economic and non-­white backgrounds disproportionately labeled, but even more important, Mexican-­American and Black students, for instance, who were assigned the label of mental retardate were actually less “deviant” than whites. That is, they had higher IQ’s than the “Anglos” who were so labeled. Given Bourdieu’s arguments quoted in Chapter 2, this should not surprise us too much. Yet another fact should be noted. The school was most often the only institution to label these nonmodal students as retarded, primarily because of the prevailing assumptions of normality that were held by school personnel. These students performed quite well once outside the boundaries of that institution. Mercer is at least partly correct when she attributes this overdistribution of the mental retardate designation to the diagnostic, evaluative, and testing “machinery” of the school.43 Based as it is on statistical formulations that conform to problematic institutional assumptions concerning normality and deviance drawn from existing and often biased economic and political structures, it plays a large part in the process of channeling certain types of students into preexisting categories. The painful fact that this supposedly helpful machinery of diagnosis and remediation does not meet the reality of the child is given further documentation by Mehan’s important study of supposedly “normal” young children’s reconstruction of the meaning of a testing situation and the evaluative instruments themselves.44 In essence, what he found was that even in the most personally administered diagnostic testing, “testers” were apt to use speculative and inaccurate labels to summarize even more speculative and inaccurate results. The school tests actually obscured the children’s real understanding of the materials and tasks, did not capture the children’s varied abilities to reason adequately, and did not show “the negotiated, contextually bound measurement decisions that the tester makes while scoring children’s behavior as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’.” While this was especially true of “non-­modal” children (in this case, Spanish-­speaking) it was also strikingly true for all other students as well. If this research is correct, given the intense pressure for “accountability” today, the dominance of a process-­product testing mentality, hence, will no doubt lead to even more problematic, anonymous, and culturally and economically biased institutions due to the labels that stem from the testing process itself. The importance given to testing in schools cannot be underestimated in other ways. The labels that come from these “diagnoses” and assessments are not easily shaken off, and are in fact used by other institutions to continue the definitional ascription given by the school. That is, it should be quite clear that not only does the school perform a central function of assigning labels to children in the process of sorting them and then distributing different knowledge, dispositions, and views of self to each of these labeled groups, but, just as important, the school occupies the central position in a larger network of other

Commonsense Categories   53 institutions. The labels imputed by the public schools are borrowed by legal, economic, health, and community institutions to define the individual in his or her contact with them as well.45 Thus, as institutions that are heavily influenced by statistical and “scientific” models of operation to define normality and deviance, models that are consistently biased toward extant social regularities, schools seem to have a disproportionate effect on labeling students. Because public schools depend almost exclusively on a statistical model for their normative frame, they generate categories of deviance that are filled with individuals largely from lower socio-­economic groups and ethnic minorities.46 The ethical, political, and economic implications of this creation of deviant identities should be obvious. This makes one notion very significant. The only serious way to make sense out of the imputation of labels in schools is to analyze the assumptions that underlie the definitions of competence these entail; and this can only be done in terms of an investigation of those who are in a position to impose these definitions.47 Thus, the notion of power (what economic group or social class actually has it and how it is really being used) becomes a critical one if we are to understand why certain forms of social meanings—the authoritative election Blum talks of in the quote at the outset of this chapter—are used to select and organize the knowledge and perspectives educators employ to comprehend, order, value, and control activity in educational institutions.

Power and Labeling How important a sense of the way power operates is to our understanding of the label­ ing process must not be underestimated for at least one particular reason. There has evolved over the past few years a large body of research on labeling. It has been strongly influenced by social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and other perspectives that tend to see, in part correctly, that labels, like “reality,” are social constructions.48 This rather phenomenological tradition has usually been less concerned with what I have called relational analysis, however. Because of this, we must be wary of some significant limitations in the usual analyses of categories and labels done by labeling theorists and others. In fact, an unrelational focus on labeling, one that is not overtly concerned with the connections between economic and cultural power and schools, can lead us into the conceptual and political trap that has so often closed on the investigations done by the symbolic interactionists, labeling theorists, and phenomenological sociologists of the school.49 By examining the labeling process (as an indicator of how ideological saturation in the heads of educators actually operates in day to day school life, here) we can forget that it is an indicator of something beyond itself as well. For as the quote from Whitty pointed out earlier in this volume, the mere fact that these categories and labels are social constructs does not explain why this particular set exists nor why it is so resistant to change. Sharp and Green’s discussion of the relationship between power and labeling in their ethnographic study of a working class British primary school provides a number of significant comments on this danger. For Sharp and Green, social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, and so forth simply do not provide an

54   Commonsense Categories a­ dequate analytic framework for understanding why things such as the stratification and labeling of children go on in educational institutions. Not only is the framework conceptually weak, but it is inherently less political than it should be if we are to comprehend the complex relationship between commonsense meanings, practices, and decisions in schools and the ideological and institutional apparatus that surrounds these cultural institutions. Sharp and Green are in strong agreement with other British sociologists who criticize phenomenologically oriented research as being onesided and ultimately apolitical. For example, most phenomenological studies want to focus on the social construction of classroom reality, how the commonsense interactions of both teachers and students create and maintain the sets of meanings and identities that enable classroom life to proceed in a relatively smooth manner. Here is where those of us influenced by Marxist and neo-­Marxist perspectives want to go further, however. For the social world, with education as part of it, is not merely the result of the creative processes of interpretation that social actors engage in, a point so dear to the hearts of the social phenomenologists. It is partly this, of course. But, the everyday world that we all confront in our day to day lives as teachers, researchers, parents, children, and so forth “is structured not merely by language and meaning,” by our face to face symbolic interactions and by our ongoing social constructions, “but by the modes and forces of material production and the system of domination which is related in some way to material reality and its control.”50 Phenomenological description and analysis of social processes and labeling, while important to be sure, inclines us to forget that there are objective institutions and structures “out there” that have power, that can control our lives and our very perceptions. By focusing on how everyday social interaction sustains peoples’ identities and their institutions, it can draw attention away from the fact that individual interaction and conception is constrained by material reality. I do not mean that one should throw out social phenomenology or labeling theory here. Instead, one combines it with a more critical social interpretation that looks at the creation of identities and meanings in specific institutions like schools as taking place within a context that often determines the parameters of what is negotiable or meaningful. This context does not merely reside at the level of consciousness; it is the nexus of economic and political institutions, a nexus which defines what schools should be about, that sets limits on these parameters. These points have important implications for a serious analysis of classroom labeling, the use of “neutral” categories by educators, and the distribution of different kinds of knowledge to differently labeled children. For example, much of the literature on the labeling of children in schools tends to rest upon a peculiar brand of “idealism.” That is, it assumes that pupil identities are created almost wholly by teachers’ perceptions of students in classrooms. However, this is not merely a question of teachers’ consciousness making children’s consciousness—e.g., a teacher conceives of a student as “really dumb” and, hence, the child becomes “really dumb,” though there is some element of truth to that to be sure. Rather, it also deeply involves the objective material circumstances and expectations which both make up and surround the school environment. As Sharp and Green argue:51

Commonsense Categories   55 When considering the generation of pupil identities, for example, the pupil’s opportunity structure for acquiring any particular identity relates not merely to the teacher’s working conceptual categories in his or her consciousness, but also to the facets of the structure of classroom organization which has to be understood in relationship to a range of extra-­classroom pressures which may be or may not be appreciated by the teacher or the pupils. It is important to attempt to understand classroom social structure as the product of both symbolic context and material circumstances. The latter factors tend to be underestimated in social interactionism and social phenomenology. Thus, the modes of interaction in classrooms, the types of control, the generation and labeling of pupil identities, need to be understood as a dialectical relationship between ideology and material and economic environment. As I noted earlier, teachers’ conceptions of competence, of what is “good student performance,” of important v. unimportant knowledge, of “proper behavior” are not free-­floating ideas. These mental productions come from somewhere. They are responses to what are perceived to be real problems caused, in part, by very real environmental conditions within schools and, often, economic and social conditions “outside” that building. Thus, to understand schools one must go beyond what educational practitioners and theorists think is going on, to see the connections between these thoughts and actions to the ideological and material conditions both in and outside the school that “determine” what we think are our “real” problems. The key to uncovering this is power. Yet, as I have shown in this book, power is not always visible as economic manipulation and control. It is often manifest as forms of helping and as forms of “legitimate knowledge,” forms which seem to provide their own justification by being interpreted as neutral. Thus, power is exercised through institutions which, by running their natural course, reproduce and legitimate the system of inequality. And all of this can in fact seem even more legitimate through the role of the intellectuals who make up the helping professions such as education. This is obviously quite complex, yet even if we were to understand part of this, by the very fact of considering ourselves as a helping profession our prevailing liberal ideo­logy would have us deal with the problems of labeling by instituting limited amelioration. We would introduce things like more openness in schools. The notion behind such reforms is that by opening up classrooms the labeling process would become less essential. Children would be able to excel wherever their individual talents lie. However, these kinds of ameliorative reforms must be examined quite carefully. They may be contradictory and may actually create more of a problem, in the same manner that “achievement problems” were naturally generated in Chapter 2. Actually, as Sharp and Green show, what seems to happen is that the range of labels which can be applied is increased in more open settings, especially those in working class and culturally different areas, those areas where labeling is most intense. In the traditional classroom, what is considered as important overt knowledge tends to be limited to “academic areas”—mathematics, science, and so forth. Thus, students may tend to be labeled, when achievement criteria are used, on a fairly limited set of public knowledge forms. However, in more open settings that are part of the public school

56   Commonsense Categories system (with its historical interest in social and “intellectual” stratification and ­ideological consensus) what is construed as specifically school knowledge is increased. One is now much more interested in the “whole child” if you will. Therefore, emotionality, dispositions, physicality, and other more general attributes are added to the usual academic curricula as overt areas one must be concerned with. The latent result seems to be to increase the range of attributes upon which students may be stratified. That is, by changing the definition of school knowledge so that it includes more personal and dispositional elements, one is also latently enabling a wider possibility of labeling to go on in more “open” environments. Student identities can be even more fixed than before. This probably occurs because the basic goals of the institution—e.g., sorting students according to “natural talent,” maximizing the production of technical knowledge, etc.—are not really changed. At the same time, of course, open classrooms in middle class areas are ideally suited to teach decision-­making, flexibility, and so on to students who will become managers and professionals. This finding is not trivial, for if, say, open classrooms within traditional institutions actually create a more powerful system of stratification, then their actual functioning has to be interpreted in reproductive, not only ameliorative, terms. This ties in very closely to the discussion of the hidden curriculum in earlier chapters. As children learn to accept as natural the social distinctions schools both reinforce and teach between important and unimportant knowledge, between normality and deviance, between work and play, and the subtle ideological rules and norms that inhere in these distinctions, they also internalize visions of both the way institutions should be organized and their appropriate place in these institutions. These things are learned somewhat differently by different students, of course, and this is where the process of labeling becomes so important to social and economic class differentiation. The labeling of students, and the school’s ameliorative ideology that surrounds its decision to use particular social labels, has a strong impact on which students accept which particular distinctions as natural.

Clinical Language, the Expert, and Social Control As I argued in Chapters 2 and 3, one important latent function of schooling seems to be the distribution of forms of consciousness, often quite unequally, to students. Sociologically, then, through their appropriation of these dispositions and outlooks, students are able to be sorted into the various roles sedimented throughout the fabric of an advanced corporate society. The process of labeling occupies a subtle but essential place in this sorting. Because the designations, categories, and linguistic tools employed by educators, and especially by most members of the curriculum field of a behavioral persuasion, are perceived by them to have both “scientific” status and to be geared to “helping” students, there is little or no realization that the very language that they resort to is ideally suited to maintain the bureaucratic rationality (and the concomitant effects of social control and consensus) that has dominated schooling for so long a time.52 Edelman makes a similar point in discussing the way the distinctive language system of the “helping professions” is used to justify and marshal public support for professional practices that have profound political and ethical consequences.53

Commonsense Categories   57 Because the helping professions define other people’s statuses (and their own), the special terms they employ to categorize clients and justify restrictions of their physical movements and of their moral and intellectual influence are especially revealing of the political functions language performs and of the multiple realities it helps create. Language is both a sensitive indicator and a powerful creator of background assumptions about people’s levels of competence and merit. Just as any single numeral evokes the whole number scheme in our minds, so a term, a syntactic form, or a metaphor with political connotations can evoke and justify a power hierarchy in the person who used it and the groups that respond to it. Edelman’s basic argument is not merely that the language forms educators and others use “arrange” their reality, but also that these forms covertly justify status, power, and authority. In essence, they are ideological in both senses of the term. In short, one must examine the contradiction between a liberal perspective that is there to help and at the same time actually serves the existing distribution of power in institutions and society.54 This contradiction is difficult to miss in the language employed by school people. Perhaps this argument is best summarized by quoting again from Edelman.55 In the symbolic worlds evoked by the language of the helping professions, speculations and verified fact readily merge with each other. Language dispels the uncertainty in speculation, changes facts to make them serve status distinctions and reinforce ideology. The names for forms of mental illness, forms of delinquency, and for educational capacities are the basic terms. Each of them normally involves a high degree of unreliability in diagnosis, in prognosis, and in the prescription of rehabilitative treatments; but also entail unambiguous constraints upon clients, especially their confinement and subjection to the staff and the rules of a prison, school or hospital. The confinement and constraints are converted into liberating and altruistic acts by defining them as education, therapy, or rehabilitation. The arbitrariness and speculation in the diagnosis and the prognosis, on the other hand, are converted into clear and specific perceptions of the need for control (by the “helping group”). Regardless of the arbitrariness or technical unreliability of professional terms, their political utility is manifest; they marshal popular support for professional discretion, concentrating public attention upon procedures and rationalizing in advance any failure of the procedures to achieve their formal objectives. [my italics] That is, the supposedly neutral language of an institution, even though it rests upon highly speculative data and may be applied without actually being appropriate, provides a framework that legitimates control of major aspects of an individual’s or group’s behavior. At the same time, by sounding scientific and “expert,” it contributes to the quiescence of the public by focusing attention on its “sophistication” not on its political or ethical results. Thus, historically outmoded, and socially and politically conservative (and often educationally disastrous) practices are not only continued, but are made to sound as if they were actually more enlightened and ethically responsive ways of dealing with children.

58   Commonsense Categories As in other institutions where there is little choice about whether an individual (student, patient, inmate) may come or go as he or she pleases, by defining students through the use of such a quasi-­scientific and quasi-­clinical and therapeutic terminology and hence “showing” that students are culpable and that they are indeed “different” (they are not adults; they have not reached a certain developmental stage; they have limited attention spans, they are “culturally and linguistically deprived,” etc.), educators need not face the often coercive aspects of their own activity.56 Therefore, the ethical and ideological questions of the nature of control in school settings do not have to be responded to. The liberal vision, the clinical perspectives, the treatment language, the “helping” labels, all define it out of existence. It is possible to argue, then, that these criticisms are actually generic to clinical perspectives and helping labels themselves as they function in education since the assumptions in which they are grounded are themselves open to question.57 These viewpoints are distinguished by a number of striking characteristics, each of which when combined with the others seem logically to lead to a conservative stance toward existing institutional arrangements. The first characteristic is that the researcher or practitioner studies or deals with those individuals who have already been labeled as different or deviant by the institution. In doing this, he or she adopts the values of the social system that defined the person as deviant. Furthermore, he or she assumes that the judgments made by the institution and based on these values are the valid measures of normality and competence without seriously questioning them. Second, these clinical and helping perspectives have a strong tendency to perceive the difficulty as a problem with the individual, as something the individual rather than the institution lacks. Thus, combined with the assumption that the official definition is  the only right definition, almost all action is focused on changing the individual rather than the defining agent, the larger institutional context. Third, researchers and practitioners who accept the institutional designations and definitions tend to assume that all of the people within these categories are the same. There is an assumption of homogeneity. In this way, individual complexity is automatically flattened. The actual process of creating an abstract individual is covered by the quasi-­individualistic perspective. But this is not all, for there seem to be strong motivations for use already built into these labels and the processes and expertise behind them. That is, the “professional helpers” who employ the supposedly diagnostic and therapeutic terminologies must find (and hence create) individuals who fit the categories, otherwise the expertise is useless. This is probably a general educational fact. Once a “new” (but always limited) tool or perspective for “helping” children is generated, it tends to expand beyond the “problem” for which it was initially developed. The tools (here diagnostic, therapeutic, and linguistic) also have the effect of redefining past issues in these other areas into problems the tool is capable of dealing with.58 The best example is behavior modification. While applicable to a limited range of difficulties in schools, it becomes both a diagnostic language and a form of “treatment” for a wider range of “student problems.” Thus, for instance, its increasing use and acceptance in ghetto and working class schools and elsewhere with “disruptive” children, or with entire school classes as is becoming more the case, really acts as a cloak to cover the political fact that the nature of the existing educational institutions is unresponsive to a large portion of students.59

Commonsense Categories   59 In addition, its treatment language acts to hide the alienating wage–product relationship that has been established and called education. Finally, the perspective, by defining itself clinically, covers the very real moral questions that must be raised concerning the appropriateness of the technique itself in dealing with students who have no choice about being in the institution. One of the points that complements the foregoing discussion is that those people who are perceived as being different or deviant from normal institutional expectations are threatening to the day to day life of schools, to the normal pattern of operation that is constant and so often relatively sterile. In this regard, the labeling act can be seen as part of a complex avoidance process. It acts to preserve the tenuous nature of many interpersonal relationships within schools on which “adequate definitions of situations” depend. But even more important, it enables people like teachers, administrators, curriculum workers, and other school people to confront stereotypes rather than individuals since schools cannot deal with the distinctive characteristics of individuals to any significant degree. There is a good deal of research that supports the fact that differences from institutional expectations often result in avoidance reactions on the part of people who confront these individuals who are “deviant.”60 Thus, stereotyping and labeling are heightened and the comforting illusion that children are being helped is preserved. Yet how is this illusion maintained? Schools are often evaluated. Both personnel and programs are repeatedly scrutinized, now even more so because of the dominance of the management perspectives I focused upon in the last chapter. A multitude of experts in research and evaluation expend a huge amount of time and effort investigating the effects of schooling. Even though these experts look at schools through the limited lenses of the achievement and socialization traditions, shouldn’t the actual functioning of such day to day activity seem clear? Shouldn’t the way a good deal of the work of schools and the expertise (clinical or otherwise) that stands behind its functions as an aspect of cultural and economic reproduction be recognized? Isn’t the way “intellectuals” employ their commonsense expertise clear to them? After all, most schoolpeople and researchers truly care about both their work and the students who inhabit these institutions. Unfortunately, this recognition is rather difficult to come by. First, as I have maintained, a major reason is the manner in which such expertise functions. It is ideological. It does provide a working definition of a complex situation (in much the same way as the material conditions of a teaching environment provided the justification for the teacher’s time and energy in Chapter 3), while ongoingly recreating structurally based inequalities in knowledge and power at the same time. Second, there are barriers to such self-­consciousness built into the very role and perspective of both the evalu­ ative expert in corporate society and the receiver of such expertise as well. We should not be surprised that the basic perspectives of “experts” are quite strongly influenced by the dominant values of the collectivity to which they belong and the social situation within that society which they fill. These dominant values necessarily affect their work.61 In fact, as we have seen, these outlooks are already sedimented into the forms of language and the implicit perspectives found in the social roles intellectuals and technical experts fill. There are linguistic, programmatic, methodological, and conceptual tools, and expectations on how they are to be used, built into the job of

60   Commonsense Categories the evaluator. It is not very common for these professionals to turn their backs on the institutionalized goals, procedures, and norms that already exist and the store-­house of collected knowledge which serves these official goals that has been built up over the years in the field. In part, this is because this congerie of accepted wisdom and value is reinforced by the needs of institutional managers for special types of “expert” advice. This is an exceptionally important point. Researchers and evaluators are “experts for hire.” Here I do not mean to totally denigrate the important position they fill. Rather, the role of the expert in American society is rather unique and leads to certain expectations which are themselves problematic in educational settings. Given the status of technical knowledge in corporate economies, “experts” are under a considerable amount of pressure to present their findings as scientific information, as knowledge that has to a significant degree a scientific warrant, and, therefore, an inherent plausibility.62 As we saw in Chapter 2, this had a rather large impact on the rejection of the policy statements made by Jencks in Inequality, for instance. Not only are experts, especially educational research and evaluation experts, expected to couch their arguments in scientific terms, but because of their very position in the social system, their data and perspectives are perceived as authoritative. The weight and prestige given to their expertise is considerable.63 However, our previous discussion of how educators have appropriated an inaccurate view of scientific activity makes this prestige problematic. This appropriation leads to considerable difficulty. It enables educators to practice poor research and, most importantly, it is a major component in their tendency to confirm the achievement and socialization paradigms under which educational researchers work, even though substantive progress may require a new disciplinary matrix to replace the current one.64 The numerous findings of no significant difference might just point to this conclusion. While there are considerable conceptual and technical (to say nothing of ideological) difficulties with the usual view of what important research looks like, one thing is obvious. Even given these difficulties, schoolpeople and decision-makers do perceive the information they get from technical experts as “worthy,” again because it comes from those who hold the title of expert. One of the tasks of the expert is to furnish to the administrative leadership of an institution the special knowledge these persons require before decisions are made. The bureaucratic institution furnishes the problems to be investigated, not the expert. Hence, the type of knowledge that the expert is to supply is determined in advance. Since the expert bears no responsibility for the final outcome of a program, his or her activities can be guided by the practical interests of the administrative leaders, a point made so clearly earlier by Gouldner. And what administrators are not looking for are new hypotheses or new interpretations that are not immediately and noticeably relevant to the practical problems at hand—the teaching of reading, say. The fact that the expert is expected to work on the practical problems as defined by the institution and not offer advice outside of these boundaries is of considerable moment. It has become increasingly evident that, for whatever reasons (socialization into a position, timidity because of political pressure, a belief that engineering techniques will solve all of our problems, the ideological and material “determinations” affecting the institution, and so forth) the administrative leadership of a large organization seeks and is probably supposed to seek to reduce the

Commonsense Categories   61 new and uncertain of a complex situation with which it is confronted into a practically safe combination of “old and certain truths” about the processes of schooling.65 However, there are very few things as conceptually, ethically, and politically complex as education, and educational scholarship has hardly scratched the surface of the intricacies involved. The fact that these “old and certain truths” may be less than efficacious given the questions being raised by the reproduction theorists and others about the complicated nature of educational problems in cities and elsewhere is not often perceived to be important to consider by practical decision-­makers, for, after all, it is the role of the expert to deal with this complexity. But as we saw, the knowledge expected of the expert is already predetermined and, thus, we are caught in a double bind. The expert is expected to provide technical advice and services to help solve the institution’s needs; however, the range of issues and the types of answers which are actually acceptable are ideologically limited by what the administrative apparatus has previously defined as “the problem.” In this way the circle of inconsequential results is continued. This is certainly not new. Expertise has been used by policy-makers for quite a long time. It should be clear, though, that from the very beginnings of the assessment of social and educational programs, the kinds of help required were determined primarily by and in support of the political goals of officials, often at the expense of institutional responsiveness to its clientele.66 This raises a rather provocative question. Can one see the real functioning of one’s work, can one study the real outcomes and processes of educational programs, when one’s action and research employs categories and data derived from and serving the institution itself, without at the same time giving support to the cultural and economic apparatus which these categories and data themselves serve?67 Because of this kind of question a crucial point should be noted at this time. Of particular import for curricular and other educational research and evaluation, then, is to argue against the temptation to uncritically use officially collected statistics based on these officially defined categories that are often readily available. Rather, the more critical question to ask is “What ideological assumptions underpin the constructs within which this data was generated?”68 By raising questions of this type one may illuminate the very potent normative implications involved when educators designate students by some specific institutional abstraction. I have argued that the distribution of labels among a student population is actually a process by which one social group makes value judgments about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of another group’s action. If such a perspective is correct, then the points I have been articulating suggest that a good deal of investigation remains to be done showing how the ideologically hegemonic structures of dominant groups in American society when imposed upon schools have rather wide ethical, political, and social implications in that they may assist in sorting out individuals according to class, race, and sex quite early in life. These are quite frankly difficult questions. Yet, in the very act of searching for relief from the all too real moral and political responsibilities and dilemmas of influencing others, educators have done what Szasz calls “mystifying and technicizing their problems of living.” What this has to say about the dominance in educational thought of psychological models and metaphors based upon a neutral and “strict science” image is quite significant.69

62   Commonsense Categories The orientations which so predominate curriculum and educational theory, and indeed have consistently dominated it in the past, effectively obscure and often deny the profound ethical and economic issues educators face. As we have seen, they transform these dilemmas into engineering problems or puzzles that are amenable to technical “professional” solutions. Perhaps the best example is the field’s nearly total reliance on perspectives drawn from the psychology of learning. The terminology drawn from this psychology and its allied fields is quite inadequate since it neglects or at base tends to draw attention from the basically political and moral character of social existence and human development. The language of reinforcement, learning, negative feedback, and so forth is a rather weak tool for dealing with the continual encroachment of contradiction upon order, with the issue of what counts as legitimate knowledge, with the creation and recreation of personal meaning and interpersonal institutions, with the reproductive nature of schooling and other institutions, and with notions such as responsibility and justice in conduct with others. In essence, like the language of systems management, the language of psychology as it is exercised in curriculum “de-­ethicizes and depoliticizes human relations and personal conduct.”70 For example, much of our busy endeavor to define operational objectives and to state student “outcomes” in behavioral terms may be interpreted as exactly that— busy work, if I may use commonsense terminology for the moment. That is, because of the field’s preoccupation with the working of its goal statements and “output measures,” attention is diverted from the crucial political and moral implications of our activity as educators. In this way means are turned into ends and children are transformed into manipulable and anonymous abstractions called “learners.” Speaking of the field of sociology, though quite the same things could be said about a large portion of curricular language and research, Friedrich articulates part of the problem clearly.71 What sociologists appear completely unaware of is the long-­run impact of coming to conceive of one’s fellows as manipulable. Language—and the choice among symbols it entails—pervades all meaningful social action, either overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously. The symbolic manipulation of man cannot be wholly isolated from the rest of a person’s symbolically mediated relationships with others. As man’s intellectual life more and more demands such symbolic manipulation, he runs the increasing risk of conceiving man in other areas of his life in terms that invite or are particularly amenable to a means–­end relationship rather than those that support an attitude toward others as ends in themselves. Thus, the manipulative ethos and the structures of ideological domination of a larger society are found within curriculum discourse in the basic behavioral and treatment language and categories used for even conceiving of educational relationships. It thereby creates and reinforces patterns of interaction that not only reflect but actually embody the interests in stratification, unequal power, certainty, and control that dominate the consciousness of advanced corporate societies.

Commonsense Categories   63

Some Counterexamples A number of alternative examples can be used to show that the conceptions, categories, and labels that I have been analyzing are, in fact, commonsensical and ideological not preordained or “natural.” In our society, there is a high premium put on intelligence, especially in relation to the student’s ability to enhance the production of economically important knowledge. Schools are obviously partly organized around and value such a concept. The fact that they limit it to quite constricted and mostly verbal versions of it, ones usually embodying the cultural capital of dominant groups, is important but not the point here. Rather, we should note that it is possible to describe other conceptions around which our educational and social institutions could be organized and our technology designed. For instance, envision a society in which physical grace not our overly constricted definitions of competence and intelligence was the most valued characteristic.72 Those who were clumsy or reached merely lower categories of grace might then be discriminated against. The culture’s educational structure would categorize individuals according to their “capacity for grace.” The technology would be so designed that it would require elegance in motion for it to be employed. Besides physical grace (which is really not too outlandish a concept) one could also point to the possibility of valuing, say, moral excellence or the collective commitment seen in students in many socialist countries. After all, these types of dispositional elements are some of the things that education is all about, aren’t they? However, as the literature on the hidden curriculum strongly suggests, the basic regularities of schools excel in teaching the opposite. For example, because of the dominance of individualistic evaluation—both public and private, of oneself and one’s peers—in school settings subterfuge, hiding one’s real feelings, joy at someone else’s failure, and so forth, are quite effectively taught. This occurs merely by the student living within an institution and having to cope with its density, power, and competitiveness.73 The implications of these counterexamples are rather significant for they indicate that a serious attempt at changing the accepted commonsense conceptions of competence in practice may need to change the basic regularities of the institutional structure of schooling itself. The regularities themselves are among the “teaching devices” that communicate lasting norms and dispositions to students, that instruct children in “how the world really is.” It is important to notice the critical implications of each of these alternative conceptions for the business, advertising, and other institutions of the larger society as well. They act as potent reminders that criticism of many of the characteristics of schools and social, political, and cultural criticism must go hand in hand. Schools do not exist in a vacuum. For instance, much of the labeling process that I have been examining here has at its roots a concern for efficiency. That is, schools as agents of both social control and cultural and economic reproduction in some sense need to operate as efficient organizations and labeling helps a good deal in this.74 As much activity as possible must be rationalized and made goal specific so that cost effectiveness and smoothness of operation are heightened and “waste,” inefficiency, and uncertainty are eliminated. Furthermore, conflict and argumentation over goals and procedures must be minimized so as not to jeopardize existing goals and procedures. After all, there is a good deal of economic and psychological investment in these basic institutional regularities.

64   Commonsense Categories ­ echniques for the control and manipulation of difference must be developed, then, T in order to prevent disorder of any significant sort from encroaching on institutional life. If significant difference (either intellectual, aesthetic, valuative or normative) is found, it must be incorporated, redefined into categories that can be handled by existing bureaucratic and ideological assumptions. The fact that these assumptions are relatively unexamined and are, in fact, self-­confirming as long as educators employ categories that grow out of them is forgotten. However, to point to the schools as the originators of this concern for efficiency above all else in education that I have analyzed in these last two chapters is too limited an appraisal. The roots of this perspective lie in an ideology that provides the constitutive framework for thought and action in all corporate societies, an instrumental ideology that places efficiency, standardized technique, profit, increasing division and control of labor, and consensus at its very heart. Consequently, the caughtness of schools and especially the curriculum field in what Kliebard has called a factory model75 is part of a larger social problem concerning the lack of responsive of our major institutions to human needs and sentiment. To lose sight of this is to miss much of the real problem. As we have seen, however, recognition of the dialectical relationship between schools and economic and cultural control is not something educators are used to looking for. This is really something of a problem of misrecognition, one that is compounded by the ideological saturation of educators’ consciousness. Since educators employ the achievement and socialization traditions uncritically, the labels, categories, and legitimate knowledge generated from such perspectives are seen as natural. The real relations that these “differentiations, evaluations, and judgments of worth” have to the social division of labor and to economic and cultural control are obscured by the seemingly neutral scientific status of the perspectives themselves. Taken together, they provide an ideal agency of hegemony. There is a complex combination of forces at work here. The selective tradition operates so that the cultural capital that has contributed to the rise of and continued domination by powerful groups and classes is transformed into legitimate knowledge and is used to create the categories by which students are dealt with. Because of the school’s economic role in differentially distributing a hidden curriculum to different economic, cultural, racial, and sexual groups, linguistic, cultural, and class differences from the “normal” will be maximally focused upon and will be labeled as deviant. Technical knowledge will then be used as an intricate filter to stratify students according to their “ability” to contribute to its production. This, thereby, increases the sense of the neutrality of this process of economic and cultural stratification and both covers and makes more legitimate the actual workings of power and ideology in an unequal society. As Bourdieu and Passeron so forcefully put it, “Every power which manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds its own specifically symbolic force to those power relations.”76 It is in the combination between the school’s use of “neutral” perspectives embody­ ing the interests of technical control and certainty, and the way schools serve the interests of economic and cultural reproduction, that schools carry out their varied functions. Technical perspectives, ones taught to and used by educators as mere

Commonsense Categories   65 ­ rocedures, complement the needs of an unequal society for the maximization of the p production of technical knowledge, the distribution of an acritical and positivistic perspective, and the production of agents with the appropriate norms and values to roughly fill the requirements of the ongoing division of labor in society.77 This is a dialectical process. Schools make legitimate the role of such technical and positivistic knowledge, as well. They, thereby, can employ it as a set of supposedly neutral proced­ ures, ones based on “ultimately right principles,” to stratify students according to their contribution to its maximization and to economic needs. Cultural forms, hence, residing at the very bottom of our brains, working in tandem with the nexus of relations the school has to the economic arena, help recreate the ideological and structural hegemony of the powerful. The overt curriculum, the hidden curriculum, and the history of each, are tied to the categories we employ so easily to give meaning to our day to day activity, which are in turn tied to and justify social interests. It may be hard to see the results of our programmatic and intellectual labors as contributing to hegemony. Yet, by seeing how these elements fit together, relationally, with the actual structures of domination in a society, we can now begin to see the mechanisms through which cultural and economic reproduction operate in schools. In so doing, we get a clearer picture of why “Them that has, gets.” Because of many of the “determinations” I have examined in this volume, in schools as in other institutions, they do get.

Notes   1. Alan F. Blum, “Sociology, Wrongdoing, and Akrasia: An Attempt to Think Greek about the Problem of Theory and Practice,” Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance, Robert A. Scott and Jack D. Douglas, eds (New York: Basic Books, 1972), p. 343.   2. Cf., Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966).   3. See, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1958) and Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971).   4. Jack D. Douglas, American Social Order (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 9–10.   5. William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 21–22.   6. Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). See also, Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).   7. Edwin M. Schur, Labeling Deviant Behavior (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 33.   8. On the dominance of a social control ethic in schools see Clarence Karier, Paul Violas, and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973) and Barry Franklin, “The Curriculum Field and Social Control” (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1974).   9. Douglas, op. cit., p. 181. See also the discussion of interpretive and normative rules in Aaron Cicourel, “Basic and Normative Rules in the Negotiation of Status and Role,” Recent Sociology, no. 2. Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 4–45. 10. Herbert M. Kliebard, “Persistent Curriculum Issues in Historical Perspective,” Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, William Pinar, ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1975), pp. 39–50. 11. I am again using the concept of ideology here to refer in part to commonsense views of the world held by specific groups, not merely as “politically” biased views. This follows from Harris’s statement that “Ideologies are not disguised descriptions of the world, but rather real descriptions of the world from a specific viewpoint, just as all descriptions of the world

66   Commonsense Categories are from a particular viewpoint.” Nigel Harris, Beliefs in Society: The Problem of Ideology (London: A. Watts, 1968), p. 22. 12. See Susanne Langer’s articulate treatment of the necessity of discursive and nondiscursive forms of rationality in her Philosophy in a New Key (New York: Mentor, 1951). 13. Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 84. 14. Ibid., p. 96. 15. Alice Miel, Changing The Curriculum: A Social Process (New York: D. Appleton-­Century, 1946). 16. I have discussed this elsewhere in Michael W. Apple, “The Process and Ideology of Valuing in Educational Settings,” Educational Evaluation: Analysis and Responsibility, Michael W. Apple, Michael J. Subkoviak, and Henry S. Lufler, Jr., eds (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1974), pp. 3–34. 17. Insightful treatments of this thesis can be found in Roger Dale et al., eds, Schooling and Capitalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), Denis Gleeson, ed., Identity and Structure (Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1977), and Trent Schroyer, “Toward a Critical Theory for Advanced Industrial Society,” Recent Sociology, no. 2, Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 210–234. 18. Ian Hextall, “Marking Work,” Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge, Geoff Whitty and Michael Young, eds (Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1976), p. 67. 19. Apple, “The Process and Ideology of Valuing in Educational Settings,” op. cit. 20. See Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). See also Marx’s discussion of the dialectical relationship between infrastructure and superstructure in Capital, vol. I (New York: New World, 1967), pp. 459–507. 21. Cf., Jean-­Paul Sartre, Search For a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1963) and Andre Gorz, Strategy For Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 22. See, for example, the well-­written portrayal of Marx’s own lack of rigid dogmatism in Michael Harrington, Socialism (New York: Bantam Books, 1972). For a reappraisal of Marx’s supposed economic determinism, one that argues against such an interpretation, see Berteli Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge University Press, 1971). 23. This subtle interplay between cultural and class interpretations is described quite nicely in Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For a discussion of the phenomenological theory of “truth,” see Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), p. 184. 24. Charles Taylor, “Marxism and Empiricism,” British Analytic Philosophy, Bernard Williams and Alan Montifiore, eds (New York: Humanities Press, 1966), pp. 227–246. 25. Berteli Ollman, op. cit., p. 18. 26. Ibid., p.  15. This position has been given the name of a “philosophy of internal relations.” Oddly, such a view has had an extensive history in American thought, even somewhat in educational thought. See, for example, the work of Whitehead such as Process and Reality. 27. Ibid., p. 90. 28. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 83. For a history of the ideological position taken by many of the pragmatists in education, see Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric (New York: John Wiley, 1975). 29. Ibid., p. 268. 30. Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination (New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 30–31. 31. Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 117. Avineri puts it this way, “Ultimately, a commodity is an objectified expression of an intersubjective relationship.” 32. Michael F. D. Young, “Knowledge and Control,” Knowledge and Control, Michael F. D. Young, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 2. 33. On the relationship between this transformation of human interaction into other reified forms and an ideological political, and economic framework, see Ollman, op. cit., pp. 198–199. 34. Douglas, op. cit., pp. 70–71.

Commonsense Categories   67 35. Robert A. Scott, “A Proposed Framework for Analyzing Deviance as a Property of Social Order,” Scott and Douglas, op. cit., p. 15. 36. Bonnie Freeman, “Labeling Theory and Bureaucratic Structures in Schools” (unpublished paper, University of Wisconsin, Madison, n.d.). 37. Scott, op. cit., p. 14. See also the discussion of deviance as a threat to taken for granted perspectives in Berger and Luckmann, op. cit. 38. Cf., Aaron Cicourel and John Kitsuse, The Educational Decision-­Makers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1963). That this labeling process begins upon the students’ initial entry into schools, with the initial labels becoming increasingly crystallized, is documented in Ray C. Rist, “Student Social Class and Teacher Expectation: The Self-­Fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education,” Harvard Educational Review, XL (August, 1970), 411–451. 39. Thomas S. Szasz, Ideology and Insanity (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 149. The fact that once students are so labeled, other educational and economic opportunities are quite firmly closed off is clearly documented in James Rosenbaum, Making Inequality (New York: John Wiley, 1976). 40. Erving Goffman, Asylums (New York: Doubleday, 1961). 41. Szasz, op. cit., p. 58. 42. Jane R. Mercer, Labeling the Mentally Retarded (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 43. Ibid., pp. 96–123. 44. Hugh Mehan, “Assessing Children’s School Performance,” Childhood and Socialization, Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 240–264. For further discussion of how dominant modes of educational evaluation and assessment ignore the concrete reality of students and function in a conservative political and epistemological manner, see Apple, “The Process and Ideology of Valuing in Educational Settings,” op. cit. 45. Mercer, op. cit., p. 96. 46. Ibid., pp. 60–61. 47. Michael F. D. Young, “Curriculum and the Social Organization of Knowledge,” Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change, Richard Brown, ed. (London: Tavistock, 1973), p. 350. 48. Some of the best work of this type in education can be found in David Hargreaves et al. Deviance in Classrooms (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). 49. A number of the political difficulties of labeling theory are laid out in Ian Taylor and Laurie Taylor, eds, Politics and Deviance (London: Pelican, 1973) and Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, Critical Criminology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 50. Rachel Sharp and Anthony Green, Education and Social Control (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 25. My discussion here draws upon the exceptional theoretical analysis in their first two chapters. 51. Ibid., p. 6. 52. Freeman, op. cit. and Herbert M. Kliebard, “Bureaucracy and Curriculum Theory,” Freedom, Bureaucracy, and Schooling, Vernon Haubrich, ed. (Washington: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1971), pp. 74–93. 53. Murray Edelman, “The Political Language of the Helping Professions” (unpublished paper, University of Wisconsin, Madison, n.d.), pp. 3–4. 54. Ibid., p. 4. 55. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 56. Goffman, op. cit., p. 115. 57. Jane R. Mercer, “Labeling the Mentally Retarded,” Deviance: The Interactionist Perspective, Earl Rubington and Martin S. Weinberg, eds (New York: Macmillan, 1968). For a more complete treatment of the conservative posture of clinical and helping viewpoints, see Apple, “The Process and Ideology of Valuing in Educational Settings,” op. cit. 58. One interesting point should be made here. Persons employing clinical perspectives in dealing with health or deviance are apt to label people as “sick” rather than “well” in most instances to avoid the danger of what might happen to the “patient” if they are wrong. Here, one more motivation for “finding” individuals to fit institutional categories can be uncovered. Thomas Scheff, Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory (Chicago: Aldine, 1966), pp. 105–106.

68   Commonsense Categories 59. A number of critical researchers have argued that the “discipline and achievement problems” of schools are, in fact, indications of nascent class conflict. See Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, La Escuela Capitalista (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1975). 60. Schur, op. cit., p. 51. This is not to say that all labeling can be done away with. It is to say, however, that we must begin to raise serious critical questions on how specific labels and the massiveness of the reality these categories represent function in school settings. 61. James E. Curtis and John W. Petras, eds, The Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 48. 62. Jack D. Douglas, “Freedom and Tyranny in a Technological Society,” Freedom and Tyranny: Social Problems in a Technological Society, Jack D. Douglas, ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. 17. 63. See the discussion of the role of the expert in Alfred Schutz, “The Well-­informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge,” Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 120–134. 64. Michael W. Apple, “Power and School Knowledge,” The Review of Education, III (January/ February 1977), 26–49 and Michael W. Apple, “Making Curriculum Problematic,” The Review of Education, II (January/February 1976), 52–68. 65. Florian Znaniecki, The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 45–49. 66. Douglas, American Social Order, op. cit., p. 49. See also the discussion of how engineering expertise was used to support a management ideology to control the work force, in David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977). 67. This is not to say that one ignores official data. As Marx showed in Capital, official data may be exceptionally important in illuminating the actual workings of, and assumptions behind, an economic system. 68. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, “Advances Towards a Critical Criminology,” Theory and Society, I (Winter 1974), 441–476. 69. The term “strict science” refers here to fields whose fundamental interests reflect and are dialectically related to the dominant interests of advanced industrial economic systems and thus are grounded in process–product or purposive–rational logic. These interests are in technical rules, control, and certainty. Among the fields one could point to are behavioral psychology and sociology. See Jürgen Habermas, “Knowledge and Interest,” Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair Maclntyre, eds (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 36–54 and Michael W. Apple, “Scientific Interests and the Nature of Educational Institutions,” Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, William Pinar, ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1975), pp. 120–130. 70. Szasz, op. cit., p. 2. 71. Robert W. Friedrich, A Sociology of Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 172–173. 72. Lewis A. Dexter, “On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society,” The Other Side, Howard S. Becker, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 37–49. 73. Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random House, 1963) and Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968). Goffman’s notion of “secondary adjustments” is quite helpful in interpreting parts of the hidden curriculum. Goffman, op. cit., p.  189. Some alternatives to these pedagogical practices can be found in William Kessen, ed., Childhood in China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), and Geoff Whitty and Michael Young, eds, Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge (Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1976). 74. Schur, op. cit., p. 96. 75. Kliebard, “Bureaucracy and Curriculum Theory,” op. cit. 76. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-­Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), p. 5. 77. A recent and exceptionally interesting ethnographic study of how this production of agents operates on a day-­to-day level, one that gets away from viewing schools as black boxes, can be found in Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977).

4 Seeing Education Relationally The Stratification of Culture and People in the Sociology of School Knowledge Michael W. Apple Lois Weis The daily life of teachers, administrators, parents, and students in our schools is filled with political and ideological pressures and tensions. Budget cuts and layoffs, class, race, and gender antagonisms, and the internal politics of complex bureaucratic institutions—all of these are part of the turmoil experienced by those working within the schools. At a time of fiscal crisis and, often, severe ideological differences about what schools should do, it is hard not to think about education as part of a larger framework of institutions and values. While this has been recognized for years by many people who work in schools and/or write about them, the mainstream of educational research has been overly psychological. By focusing primarily on how to get students to learn more mathematics, science, history, and so forth (surely not an unimportant problem), it has neglected to inquire into the larger context in which schools exist, a context that may actually make it very difficult for them to succeed. Actually, this dominant research model—what has been called the “achievement tradition”—has been weakened by its neglect of two things. First, because of its positivistic emphasis and its overreliance on statistical approaches, it has been unable to unravel the complexities of everyday interaction in schools. Its focus on product has led to a thoroughgoing naivete about the very process of education, about the internal dynamics of the institution. Second, its tendency toward a-­theoreticism has made it difficult for us to link these internal dynamics to that larger ideological, economic, and political context.1 In this research model, schools sit isolated from the structurally unequal (and conflict-­ridden) society of which they are—in real life—fully a part. In their exceptionally clear discussion of the major approaches to research in education, Karabel and Halsey (1977, p.  61) state that one of the most important research programs required at this time is to connect “interpretive” studies of schools with “structural” analyses. That is, to move forward we need an approach which combines an investigation of the day-­to-day curricular, pedagogic, and evaluative activities of schools with generative theories of the school’s role in society. This essay reviews some of the arguments that have led to this recognition and have carried it forward. [This article is a revised and shortened version of an essay entitled “Ideology and Practice in Schooling” in Michael Apple and Lois Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983)]

70   Seeing Education Relationally

What Schools Do As Hogan (1982) notes, it is difficult to separate educational issues from larger “political” issues. He identifies four categories into which these issues have fallen: structural politics centered upon the nature and strength of the alignment of the school with the economy (for example, conflicts over differentiated and vocational education) and conflicts over the structure of authority relations within schools (for example, conflicts over the centralization of administrative authority, unionization and professionalism); human capital politics generated by the efforts of parents or communities to enhance the rates of return to their children or school population relative to other children or school populations; cultural capital politics created by conflicts over competing definitions of legitimate knowledge, that is, conflicts over the distribution of symbolic authority in the society (for example, conflicts over curricula content or textbooks); and finally, displacement politics, in which educational issues (often, though not always, conflicts of a cultural capital kind) become proxies for other non-­educational conflicts in the community. (pp. 52–53) (italics added) Hogan’s categories are ideal types but still useful. Conflicts over knowledge, over economic goods and services, and over power relations within and outside the school are all of considerable moment. In order to understand these complex issues, we need to step back from thinking about schools as places that seek only to maximize the achievement of individual students. Instead of this more psychological and individualistic perspective, we need to interpret the school more socially, culturally, and structurally. A number of questions organize these interpretations. What is it that education does in this larger context? When it does this, who benefits? In general, recent research on the social, ideological, and economic role of our educational apparatus has pointed to three activities schools engage in. Though these are clearly interrelated, we can label these “functions” as assisting in (a) accumulation, (b) legitimation, and (c) production.2 Each deserves some elaboration. Accumulation. Schools assist in the process of capital accumulation by providing some of the necessary conditions for re-­creating an unequally responsive economy. They do this in part through their internal sorting and selecting of students by “talent.” By integrating students into a credential market and a system of urban segregation, they roughly reproduce a hierarchically organized labor force (see, e.g., Castells, 1980; Collins, 1979; Ogbu, 1978). It has been argued that, as students are hierarchically ordered—an ordering generally based on the cultural forms of dominant groups (Bernstein, 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977)—different groups of students are taught different norms, skills, values, knowledge, and dispositions by race, class, and sex. In this way, schools help meet the economy’s need for a stratified and at least partially socialized body of employees (see, e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 1976; but cf. Apple, 1982c; Olneck & Bills, 1980). We have to be quite cautious here. One can easily make it seem as if everything pertaining to education can be reduced to the needs of the division of labor or economic forces outside the school. Such a perspective—commonly called a “base/superstructure”

Seeing Education Relationally   71 model—is much too simplistic and mechanistic (see Apple, 1982b, 1982c; Hall, 1977). Avoiding such reductionism, however, does not mean that we can ignore the very real ties between an economy and the sorting and selecting activity of education. Legitimation. Schools are an important part of a complex structure through which social groups are given legitimacy and through which social and cultural ideologies are re-­created, maintained, and continuously built. That is, they are agencies of legitimation (Meyer, 1977). Thus, schools tend to describe both themselves and society as meritocratic and as inexorably moving toward greater social and economic justice. In this way, they foster a social belief that the major institutions of our society are equally responsive to all regardless of race, class, and sex. Unfortunately, the available data suggest that this is less the case than we might like to think. In fact, as a number of investigators have demonstrated, slogans of pluralism aside, in almost every social arena from health care to anti-­inflation policy, one can see a pattern in which the top 20% of the population consistently benefit much more than the bottom 80% (e.g., Navarro, 1976; O’Connor, 1973). Given the emerging politics of rightist regimes in advanced capitalist societies this disparity may be exacerbated even further (Castells, 1980). In essence, while “late capitalist society” does have some measure of pluralism, the amount of it has been greatly exaggerated, and its character has changed markedly, as both the corporate-­managed and the state-­operated sectors have increasingly gained power over our lives (Macpherson, 1981, p. 65). Yet the school’s role in legitimation is not limited to making our socio-economic system seem natural and just or demarcating groups from one another. Since schools are also part of the political institutions of our society, part of the state, they must legitimate themselves as well. That is, not just the economy, but the educational apparatus and the state bureaucracy and government in general have their own needs for legitimacy. They too must generate consent from the governed. Thus, the need for political legitimacy may not always resonate with the requirements of the economy. This complicates matters considerably Production. Finally, the educational apparatus as a whole constitutes an important set of agencies for production. This is quite complex, but basically what it implies is the following. Our mode of production, distribution, and consumption requires high levels of technical/administrative knowledge for the expansion of markets, “defense,” the artificial creation and stimulation of new consumer needs, the control and division of labor, communicative and technical innovations to increase or hold one’s share of a market or increase profit margins, and, just as importantly, cultural control.3 Schools and universities ultimately help in the production of such knowledge. As research and development centers whose costs are socialized (i.e., spread among all of us so that capital need not pay the bulk of the cost) and as training grounds for future employees of industry, universities, for example, play an essential role in making available the technically utilizable knowledge on which so much of our science-­based industries depend and on which the culture industry is based. At the same time, technical/administrative knowledge plays another, less economic, role in education. Schools themselves are dominated increasingly by technicist ideologies. The major curricular, teaching, and testing programs in use in, say, the United States are nearly all strikingly behavioral and reductive in orientation. Yet, by attempting to reduce all knowledge to atomistic behaviors, many school practices also reduce

72   Seeing Education Relationally the cultural sphere (the sphere of democratic discourse and shared understandings) to the application of technical rules and procedures. In essence, questions of “why” are transformed into questions of “how to.” When this is combined with the fact that serious conflict is usually absent from the curriculum itself, it substitutes instrumental ideologies for ethical and political awareness and debate (Apple, 1979). Here, the ideological and economic roles of schools often intersect. When this is said, though, we need again to be quite careful of falling into the trap of economism. The very notion of the educational system as assisting in the production of economically and ideologically useful knowledge points to the fact that schools are cultural as well as economic institutions. By defining certain groups’ knowledge as legitimate for production and/or distribution, while other groups’ knowledge and traditions are considered inappropriate as school knowledge, schools help not only in the production of useful technical/administrative knowledge but in the reproduction of the culture and ideological forms of dominant groups. Even here, however, as research such as Willis’s (1977) analysis of working-­class youth culture demonstrates, students in schools may often reject dominant knowledge and ideologies. The school can serve as a site for the production of alternative and/or oppositional cultural practices which do not serve (at least in any straightforward way) the accumulation, legitimation, or production needs of the state or capital. There is no simple one-­to-one correspondence between economics and culture. Thus, just as when we alluded to the relatively autonomous needs for legitimacy on the part of institutions of the state, there is a partially autonomous cultural dynamic at work in schools also, one that is not necessarily reducible to the results and pressures of the capital accumulation process. This brief description does not exhaust what schools do, of course. However, our major claims are these: We cannot fully understand the way our educational institutions are situated within a larger configuration of economic, cultural, and political power unless we attempt to examine the different functions they perform in our unequal social formation. Further, while we need to unpack the various roles schools perform, we should not necessarily assume that educational institutions will always be successful in carrying out these three functions. Accumulation, legitimation, and production represent structural pressure on schools, not foregone conclusions. In part, the possibility that education may be unable to carry out what is “required” by these pressures is strengthened by the fact that these three functions are often contradictory. They may work against each other at times. Perhaps a current example will be helpful here. In a time of fiscal crisis, industry requires fewer highly paid and highly credentialed employees. The declining need for credentialed employees and the problems of declining revenues brought about by the current economic crisis are creating a concomitant crisis in educational institutions and the government. Powerful classes and industry have begun to question the need for so many liberally trained students. The very basis of the acceptance of education’s usual modes of operating is threatened. In order to cope with the problems of falling monetary support and the questioning of its operations, the state bureaucracy and its educational apparatus (stimulated by economic pressures and by higher officials in the government itself ) have introduced highly centralized cost–benefit and accountability mechanisms, tightened “standards,” reduced funding for higher education and “frills,’’

Seeing Education Relationally   73 reintroduced “basics,” and so forth. In the process, however, other elements of the public may lose faith in the authority and legitimacy of the government if they see the tightening up as actually creating inequality and reducing the avenues they need to get ahead. Here, two of the functions of schools clash. Educational policy is truly caught in a contradictory situation. It must assist in re-­creating a relatively tight economic and ideological ship, while keeping its legitimacy in the eyes of others. The state’s need for consent, therefore, is sometimes at odds with the pressures being placed upon it by changing economic conditions (Apple, 1982c). While this is a relatively simple example, it does serve to highlight the fact that the educational apparatus is often caught between a number of potentially competing imperatives. “Solving” one set of problems may exacerbate others. Responding overtly to the problems of economic inequality may create tensions due to the other functions education “must” perform. Therefore, focusing on a single dominant requirement that the educational system supposedly performs—such as, say, its ideological and economic role in helping to reproduce the social division of labor—cannot provide an adequate account of its position as a site for other activity. As Roger Dale (1982, p. 137) has persuasively argued, any one demand being placed upon education can only be fully comprehended by seeing the relationship between it and the other structurally generated demands on the school. And these relationships are often fundamentally contradictory. Returning to our previous quote from Hogan, we can see that economic forces and conflicts do not totally cover how we should see what education does. Conflicts over knowledge and power, over culture and politics, intersect with economic determinations. Gaining a measure of theoretical insight on how these forces and conflicts both reproduce and contradict the larger relations of inequality outside the school is important, to say the least.

Status Attainment and Class While the issue of the contradictory roles schools perform has not been a primary focus among those who study education, the question of the relationship between schooling and the amelioration or re-­creation of inequality has not been ignored. The sociology of education in particular has had a long tradition of dealing with exactly this area, both through its work on status attainment and the more recent ethnographic investigations of school culture that have grown in response to some of the weaknesses of status attainment research. Unfortunately, both of these areas of the sociology of education have been less structurally inclined than they might be. They too have been challenged for some of the same reasons that the dominant, more psychological, “achievement” model has been. And while they have taken some of Hogan’s points about the political/economic nature of the institution seriously (in, for instance, the persistent attempts by status attainment researchers to link achievement in school to the occupational structure outside of it), they have been less successful in recognizing the other conflicts about and functions of our educational system. “Inequality” cannot be seen as a proxy for relations of structural domination and exploitation. Occupational choice by individuals underrepresents class dynamics and class structure. In fact, the occupational

74   Seeing Education Relationally structure is not the same as class structure (Wright, 1980). And, finally, as we have argued, schools do more than link one to an occupational status in the first place. Let us examine the status attainment research in more detail, since its conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses provide the context for a good deal of the impetus for the arguments we shall make here. Perhaps the best way of seeing these issues is to counterpose the status attainment and ethnographic research programs against each other and examine the arguments about each one. As we shall see, there is often a relatively large divide between, and within, these two approaches. Though it is unfortunate, the division between a sociology of education concerned with large-­scale and statistically complex studies of status attainment on the one hand and smaller-­scale, more intense, studies of the internal characteristics on the other is currently rather large. It is almost as if the “soft” folks never read the “number crunchers” and vice versa. One need only read, say, two journals to find evidence of this split: Sociology of Education here in the United States and a new English publication that promises to be quite interesting, the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The former is filled with relatively a-­theoretical but statistically sophisticated studies; the latter mainly contains theoretical, historical, and ethnographic papers. Of course, there are other divisions within this literature, ones that are just as significant as we shall see. The debate between Marxist and more usual stratification approaches to the study of the benefits one might get from education is beginning in earnest. The argument between symbolic interactionism and more Marxist, structural analyses of the internal characteristics of schools is continuing and is still rather intense (Apple, 1978). Many of our comments in this section will have to do with these multiple divisions and how they have led to a substantive and fruitful program of research on the more general problem of the relationship between education and the economic and cultural reproduction of class relations. The basic question that research on status attainment seeks to answer is this: What is the balance between ascribed and achieved characteristics in the determination of someone’s future educational and occupational success (Wright, 1979, p.  77)? Status attainment researchers also investigate this question with respect to adult income. Many of the longitudinal studies that have emerged from this approach have sought to investigate the relationship between differential educational attainment and social stratification. The underlying idea on which such studies are based is that longitudinal investigations of the relationship between academic attainment and, say, future occupation or income level “will help us understand not only ‘who ends up where’ but ‘how they get there.’ ” (Kerckhoff, 1980, p. viii). The tradition on which this research is based should be applauded for its statistical sophistication, a sophistication that has grown markedly in the last decade or so. It should be commended for both its emphasis on reanalysis of its prior work in the light of new methodological advances and its practitioners’ attempt to build upon one another’s research.4 Finally, it should be recognized as having played quite an important part (though perhaps less than it might like) in policy deliberation at a national level. However, when all of this is said, and it should be, it is just as clear that the research is undertheorized in important ways. What it all means is opaque since its theoretical grounding remains problematic. Whether it fully answers the question of “how they got there,” or how we are to think about who “they” are, remains open to question.

Seeing Education Relationally   75 For example, the relationship between educational attainment and occupational structure, even when treated elegantly, relies on a particular unarticulated vision of our economy. It underrepresents and undertheorizes class as an essential variable. Here we mean class not as where you stand on a particular occupational scale (such as the widely known Duncan scale), but class as a complex assemblage of cultural and economic relationships which help constitute the production, consumption, and control of labor and of economic and cultural capital.5 The significance of these kinds of questions about class and the control of labor and production is partly documented by Wright (1979) in his interesting criticism of the tradition of status attainment research. He argues that the theoretical underpinnings of this program rest on a particular unit of analysis. This is the atomistic individual. That is, “outcomes which are attached to individuals are the essential objects of investigation, and the causes of these outcomes are largely seen as operating through individuals” (p. 70). Wright goes on, arguing that: [While] the metric for discussing occupational positions [in status attainment theory] is based on social evaluations of positions, and thus has a supra-­individual character . . . the essential dynamic of the theory, however, is conceived almost entirely at the level of atomistic individuals. Social structures have their consequences because they are embodied in individuals, in the form of personal characteristics. The class structure is seen as relevant in the analysis . . . only insofar as it constitutes one of the factors which shape the individual’s own achievements and motivations. The preoccupation of the theory is with ascription vs. achievement as determinants of individual outcomes, not with the structure of the outcomes themselves. . . . The point is that in . . . status attainment theories . . . social structures are viewed as interesting largely as determinants or constraints on individual actions and outcomes. With few exceptions, they have little theoretical relevance in their own right. (p. 70) Thus, Wright claims that the lack of an adequate theory of social structure and political economy, one that is specific to our kind of economic formation, makes it difficult for stratification researchers to fully understand the relationship between education and differential benefits. To do otherwise would require a different unit of analysis, a fully developed perspective on social class rather than the atomistic individual. In sum, it has been argued that this kind of research is fundamentally weakened by its underdeveloped notion of class, its choice of the individual rather than social structure and classes as the basic unit of analysis, and its a-­theoretical assumptions about occupations and the division of labor (Wright, 1980). These are not “merely” theoretical points. They have provided the background for an interesting and more structurally oriented empirical program as well. Recent research summarized by Wright (1979) has documented some rather important conclusions here. For example, class compares favorably with status in predicting even individual success (p. 126). When class is a major unit of analysis, it is clear that in the current class structure of the United States, managers receive greater income returns

76   Seeing Education Relationally from their education than do workers (p. 165). Furthermore, some data indicate that “class position is at least as powerful an explanatory variable in predicting income as occupational status” (p. 225). But what about advantages by race and gender? While it would be historically inaccurate and conceptually naive to reduce all gender and racial issues to those of class, research suggests that when class (defined more fully and adequately than in most of the stratification and status attainment literature) is controlled, other differences in the benefits gotten from education are flattened out. This is true of the differences between blacks and whites (p. 195) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, between women and men (p. 216). The real issue here is to begin to inquire into why there is such a large concentration of women and minority members within the working class and even more specifically within particular fractions of that class. How do gender, race, and class interpenetrate each other in contemporary capitalism?6 It is difficult to fully understand given the theoretical gaps in much of the current literature. This is not to say that the results of this tradition of research are inconsequential. Indeed, many of the results, and the technical procedures employed to generate them, are quite interesting. An example is found in the recent report by Jencks and his colleagues, Who Gets Ahead? (1979). The findings there (largely by Michael Olneck in his analysis of the effects of education) are often quite provocative. Olneck argues, for instance, that there are few substantial returns to blacks if they complete only high school, and that relatively higher returns accrue only to those blacks who make it through college. Such data can (and should) make us raise rather important questions about our attempts at ameliorative curricular reform. Added to this is the fact that high school graduation seems to have greater payoff for those people who already come from relatively advantaged backgrounds. “Men who come from disadvantaged backgrounds must attend college to reap large occupational benefits from their education.”7 Surely these findings are interesting. But, again, without a more serious analysis of the political economy of our kind of social formation, they lack a coherent framework that would enable us to put these and other data together into a viable structural program. Their meaning is, in fact, unclear. Status attainment research, even in its more interesting empirical work, has been subject to at least one other serious criticism that is quite important to our arguments in this essay. It has tended to treat schools as black boxes. It relies largely on questionnaires, tests of various kinds, official records, occasionally interviews, and so on, but it almost never enters into schools to find out how the results that appear on these records are actually produced. The flesh and blood of real students, teachers, and administrators accomplishing all this is never seen. Even those researchers who—like Bowles and Gintis (1976)—are critical of existing research in that tradition and who are on the political left, fall into the same trap. They still treat schools as if the internal characteristics of these institutions are relatively unimportant sociologically or, even when discussed, not to be probed first hand. In Bowles and Gintis’s case, this proved to be a particular problem since as recent Marxist ethnographies have demonstrated, the correspondence between what is purported to be taught in schools and the needs of a hierarchical labor market are not that clear. As we noted earlier, working-­class students, for instance, often expressly reject the credentials, the overt and hidden curriculum, and the norms that are purportedly taught in schools (Apple, 1982c). The reliance

Seeing Education Relationally   77 on “external” and “objective” data made it hard for Bowles and Gintis, like other stratification researchers before them, to do other than treat the school like a black box. Unfortunately, in this approach we miss out on what is actually taught, what is actually learned, what is rejected, and how the lived experience of class, race, and gender actors mediates the outcomes so well studied by stratification researchers. To be sure, the need for such research has not gone unrecognized within the status attainment tradition. Two of the most empirically sophisticated investigators within it have recently argued, quite strongly in fact, that in order to go substantially further in our understanding of what schools actually do, we need to know much more about what goes on within the walls of that institution itself (Kerckhoff, 1976; Sewell & Hauser, 1980; Weis, 1982). They are clearly suggesting an ethnographic program of analysis.

Inside the Black Box By examining one side of the divisions in sociology of education and by exploring some of the debates within that side, we do not want to give the impression that ethnographic analyses can answer all of our questions (they can’t); nor do we want the reader to assume that there is no division within this side that is equally as contentious (there is). Theoretically a good deal of ethnographic research is indebted more to phenomenologically inclined sociology than the procedures and linguistic styles of stratification research. Rather than focusing on large-­scale sampling techniques, one acts as a parti­ cipant observer. Rather than occupational and income results, one examines cultural practices within the school itself. The researcher spends long periods of time within the school, examining the “negotiated” informal and implicit social rules and meanings that actors in the particular setting apply. Woods (1979) puts it: The sociological approach which informs [this] work derives from symbolic interactionism. This concentrates on how the social world is constructed by people, how they are continually striving to make sense of the world, and assigning meanings and interpretations to events, and on the symbols used to represent them. It puts emphasis on pupils’ and teachers’ own subjective constructions of events, rather than sociologists’ assumptions of them, and elevates the process of meaning-­assignation and situation-­defining to prime importance. Hence the emphasis on “perspectives,” the frameworks through which we make sense of the world, and on different “contexts” which influence the formation and operation of these perspectives. These perceptual frameworks are then linked to action. The action is thus impregnated with the meanings assigned to it by the participants, and is revealed as a mixture of strategies, adaptations and accommodations. Wherever they go in the school, pupils and teachers are continually adjusting, reckoning, bargaining, acting, and changing. (p. 2) Such adjusting, reckoning, bargaining, acting, and changing does go on, of course. And it is important to know how it occurs, how the reality of school life is continuously

78   Seeing Education Relationally produced by our meaningful interaction. Yet the mere fact that reality is socially constructed does not indicate “how and why reality comes to be constructed in particular ways and how and why particular constructions of reality seem to have the power to resist subversion” (Whitty, 1974, p.  125). Thus, ethnographic studies too often fall short of achieving something that Karabel and Halsey realized was essential: a recognition of and a structural theory which accounts for the differential power of economic and cultural capital within the schools. This is not to say that all activity in institutions such as schools should be reduced to abstract theoretical formulations. It is to say, though, that one important weakness of such research is that it does not take seriously enough the fact that class and culture, reproduction, contestation and resistance, and contradiction are found in the everyday lives of teachers, children, and parents. They are all class, gender, and racial actors, not simply individual actors. Contradictions and tensions between and within classes, between the country and the city (and hence within particular local political economies), between sexes and races, and so on are all lived out in local communities and schools like the ones investigated by most participant observers. With all of the richness and value of these ethnographic descriptions, with all of their help in enabling us to get inside the black box of the institution, they too often leave us wondering what it all means. How can we understand elementary schools in the United States, for example, without placing them in the dynamics of class and gender? A huge majority of elementary school teachers are women, an overwhelming number of the principals are men, and these employment patterns are part of the sexual and social divisions of labor. This situation is structural, yet it is not abstract—it is lived out in schools every day (Kelly & Nihlen, 1982b; Apple, in press). Much ethnographic research in education falls prey to problems that are strikingly similar to those found in the literature on social stratification. One often finds an underdeveloped notion of social class, insufficiently linked to the political economy of the areas being studied. Appraisals of the cultural form and content of the students and the school, whatever their advances beyond most status attainment research, are still less strongly linked to the literature on class, race, and gender cultures than they should be (Clarke, Critcher, & Johnson, 1979; Women’s Studies Group, 1978). And, finally, the approach—and this is true of many ethnographies and many studies of education and stratification—lacks an important historical element. It is not connected fully enough to changes over time in the division and control of labor, to ongoing alterations in class composition, and to the historically changing functions of the state in education. This latter point, as we saw in our earlier example, is especially critical in times of what has been called the fiscal crisis of the state. As in the dominant psychological tradition of research on education, schools still too often are not consciously situated within the historically changing dynamics of the society of which they are a part. We are left here with an interesting predicament. Status attainment research has been strongly criticized for not getting within the black box of the school. A tradition of ethnographic investigation has grown rapidly, one which offers an important counter-­balance to these more statistically oriented studies. Yet, while both complement each other in this way they are equally subject to other important criticisms. Neither has rigorously pursued the connections between their questions and data and

Seeing Education Relationally   79 structural issues related to the organization and control of the particular kind of social formation in which we live. In the same way, both have employed undertheorized notions of economy, class, and culture. And, finally, each of them has systematically neglected the complex dynamics and interrelationships among class, economy, and culture. It is this nexus—the dialectical interconnections among relations of domination and exploitation, cultural form and content, and dominant modes of production—that has become the focus of “culturalist” research on the reproductive role of education. This has come to be called the “sociology of school knowledge.”

The Sociology of School Knowledge These issues surrounding economy, class, and culture within the school did not spring fully blown upon the scene. More than a decade of investigations—some conceptual, others empirical—have preceded them and have now firmly established what might be called a critical culturalist problematic within sociological studies of the school. There has been a dual focus in these culturalist studies. Culture has been analyzed both as lived experience and as commodity. The first examines culture as it is produced in ongoing interaction and as a terrain in which class, gender, and racial meanings and antagonisms are lived out. The second looks at culture as a product, as a set of artifacts produced for use. Both are necessary, and both have been present in the scholarship that has evolved. We shall not present a detailed history of the growth of the traditions these studies represent. Such analyses are available elsewhere (Apple, 1976, 1978, 1979; Grierson, 1978; Karabel & Halsey, 1977, esp. chapter 1). We shall, however, briefly lay out some of the historical, conceptual, and political foundations upon which they have rested. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when a structural analysis of the actual cultural form and content inside schools remained relatively unexplored in the sociology of education in the United States, perceptible inroads were being made into this area elsewhere. In England, for instance, the publication of Michael F. D. Young’s collection Knowledge and Control (1971) signaled the growing interest in the social origins and effects of the organization and selection of curricular knowledge. Young, Bernstein (1977), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), and others in Europe argued that the organization of knowledge, the form of its transmission, and the assessment of its acquisition are crucial factors in the cultural reproduction of class relationships in industrial societies. In the United States, often in reaction to the positivistic and technical orientation (what we earlier called the “achievement” tradition) which dominated the field, similar kinds of questions emerged. Yet they emerged less from the sociology of education than from the curriculum field itself. Strongly influenced by critical theory and the sociology of knowledge, as well as the rebirth of Marxist and neo-­Marxist dialogue, attempts were made to link the actual knowledge—both hidden and overt—found in schools to the relations of domination and subordination outside the institution (Apple, 1979). In the United States, England, and France, it was argued that the questions which most sociologists of education and curriculum researchers asked covered the fact that real relations of power were already embedded in their research models and the

80   Seeing Education Relationally approaches from which they drew. As Young (1971) put it, sociologists were apt to “take” as their research problems those questions which were generated out of the existing administrative apparatus, rather than “make” them themselves. In curriculum studies, it was claimed that issues of efficiency and increasing meritocratic achievement had almost totally depoliticized the field. Questions of “technique” had replaced the more potent and essential political and ethical issues of what we should teach and why (Apple, 1974). The interests that guided this research program as it emerged in the prior decade were threefold: (a) to replace the “individualistic, meritocratic analysis of the relationship between education and social inequality” with a more historical and structural appraisal; (b) “to displace the objectivist, psychologized” approaches to research on academic achievement and school curriculum with a “socio-­political analysis” of what counts as legitimate school knowledge; and (c) to raise challenges to the managerial, efficiency-­and technique-­oriented approaches to the organization and control of classrooms and schools and replace them with a “socially interactive and culturally based critical view” (Wexler, 1981b, p. 2). Schools were seen not only as places that “processed people,” but as institutions that “processed knowledge” as well (Young, 1971). One of the primary foci, in fact, was the complex relationship between these two kinds of “processing.” In terms of the concepts we previously introduced, it was recognized that school practices needed to be related not only to problems of individual achievement, occupational choice, and mobility, but to the processes of capital accumulation, legitimation, and production as well. Taking a key concept from Gramsci, this research sought to determine how “ideological hegemony” was maintained. How was the control of culture and meaning related to the reproduction of (and, later, resistance to) our socio/economic order? The intellectual work of this period was primarily devoted to ideology critique (Wexler, 1981a, p. 259). Ideology was usually understood in an Althusserian manner. As Mouffe (1979) put it, the individual person was not “the originating source of consciousness, the irruption of a subjective principle into objective historical process.” Instead, consciousness and meaning are made up of (“constituted by”) ideological practices that pre-­exist human subjects and which actually “produce subjectivity.” Thus, “ideology is a practice producing subjects.”9 For critical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, then, the symbolic resources organized and transmitted in the school were not neutral. Instead, they were conceptualized in ideological terms, as the cultural capital of specific groups which—though this culture did have a life of its own—functioned to re-­create relations of domination and subordination by “positioning” subjects within larger ideological discourses and relations. The culture of the school, hence, was a terrain of ideological conflict, not merely a set of facts, skills, dispositions, and social relationships that were to be taught in the most efficient and effective way possible. For Bernstein, for example, the emphasis was on how a particular segment of the middle class reproduced itself by controlling the curricular and pedagogical apparatus of the school. In Bourdieu and Passeron’s work, one saw how the cultural capital of elite groups worked in schools and universities to reproduce class boundaries both within and outside of ruling groups. This was accomplished in part because the

Seeing Education Relationally   81 educational system was relatively autonomous from the needs of production. It was this very autonomy that enabled it to do its ideological work.10 Other investigators pursued similar paths, examining how the major forms of curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation contributed to the re-­creation of the ideological hegemony of dominant classes in equally subtle and complex ways. What bound these researchers together, though, was a persistent concern with culture, not only economy, and with the relationship between what actually happened within the educational system and the structures of exploitation and domination outside it. The attempt—one which grew in sophistication over the years—was to begin to blend together serious structural analysis with studies of the lived and commodified culture of the school. The problem was to integrate micro and macro in a coherent way. This integrative intent is summarized by one of us in a passage from an earlier volume. There it was suggested that three areas needed to be interrogated if we were to go further than previous research into what schools do and who benefits from their current organization and content. We need to examine critically not just “how a student [can] acquire more knowledge” (the dominant question in our efficiency minded field) but “why and how particular aspects of the collective culture are presented in school as objective, factual knowledge?” How, concretely, may official knowledge represent ideological configurations of the dominant interests in a society? How do schools legitimate these limited and partial standards of knowing as unquestioned truths? These questions must be asked of at least three areas of school life: (1) how the basic day to day regularities of schools contribute to students learning these ideologies; (2) how the specific forms of curricular knowledge . . . reflect these configurations; (3) how these ideologies are reflected in the fundamental perspectives educators themselves employ to order, guide, and give meaning to their own activity. The first of these questions refers to the hidden curriculum in schools—the tacit teaching to students of norms, values, and dispositions that goes on simply by their living in and coping with the institutional expectations and routines of schools day in and day out for a number of years. The second question asks us to make educational knowledge itself problematic, to pay much greater attention to the “stuff ” of the curriculum, where knowledge comes from, whose knowledge it is, what social groups it supports, and so on. The final query seeks to make educators more aware of the ideological and epistemological commitments they tacitly accept and promote by using certain models and traditions—say, a vulgar positivism, systems management, structural-­functionalism, a process of social labeling, or behavior modification—in their own work. Without an understanding of these aspects of school life, one that connects them seriously to the distribution, quality, and control of work, power, ideology, and cultural knowledge outside our educational institutions, educational theory and policy making may have less of an impact than we might hope. (Apple, 1979, p. 14) While such a critical interrogation of knowledge, social relations, and ideological ­commitments would not by itself alter either education or society, such a program of

82   Seeing Education Relationally criticism was seen as an essential first step in generating more emancipatory research and practice. It was felt necessary to keep in mind the interests both of ethnographers in day-­to-day life inside the school and of stratification researchers in the institutions beyond the school. However, instead of mere description of the way actors socially construct and interpret reality, that reality was itself seen critically, as an ideological construction related to class, race, and gender hegemony. And instead of individual occupational selection, the major organizing concept was the reproduction of class relations.11 As Wexler (1983) put it, such criticism involved “removing the cloak of neutrality by reversing the cognitive social process of converting values to facts.” Without reversing this process, we would have nowhere to begin. There were problems, of course, with some of these early critical formulations. They assumed that it was relatively simple to “read” a text ideologically, that social interests were always “represented” in curriculum and teaching in some straightforward fashion much as a mirror reflects an image. Sometimes this is the case; often it is decidedly not.12 They too at times embodied a position that schools were necessarily successful in teaching a hidden curriculum, one which “reflects” (again the mirror analogy) the requirements of the division of labor in society. And, finally, they neglected the reality of contradictions and struggle. They posited too passive a model. As has become much clearer over the past few years, people—including teachers and students—may act against dominant ideological forms. The ultimate results may not be either what schools “intended” or what a simple “ideological reading” might imply. Ideological hegemony wasn’t something that either existed or didn’t exist at any particular moment. It was (and is) a constant struggle, the conclusion of which cannot be known in advance.13 This is a crucial point. Because hegemony requires the “consent” of the dominated majority in society, it can never be something that is permanent, universal, or simply given. It needs to be won continually. Whatever stability it possesses is a “moving equilibrium containing relations of forces favorable or unfavorable to this or that tendency.”14 If hegemony is neither fixed nor guaranteed, it can be fractured and challenged. These challenges, in fact, would have to arise because of the tensions, contradictions, and increasingly visible inequalities produced from our dominant mode of production, distribution, and consumption. Resistance to it, even when the resistance is less than conscious, cannot always be automatically incorporated back into dominant ideological forms.15 Thus, even the educational system itself, in terms of its internal culture and its relations to the wider society, is not simply an instrument of domination in which powerful groups control less powerful ones. It is the result of an ongoing struggle between and within dominant and dominated groups.16 Such internal criticism was not without impact. Wexler, a participant in the debates over the past decade, describes part of the changes in outlook in the following way: The dominant theoretical tendency in the critical social theory of education . . . stressed the extent to which education is social structurally determined, the depth of the operation of cultural domination through schooling, and the ways in which the culture and the microstructure of the school enable perpetuation of the macrostructural functions of capital accumulation and social legitimation. These initial insights [were] then modified. The central tenets in the model of political economy

Seeing Education Relationally   83 of schooling and of class cultural rule by the transmission of ideology as educational knowledge [were] significantly qualified. The concept of [economic] totality [was] replaced by an awareness of relative institutional autonomy. Structural integ­ ration [gave] way to the description of internal contradictions. Domination [was] mitigated by study of class conflict and student resistance within the school.17 Let us examine Wexler’s historical points in somewhat more detail. While the history of this kind of critical work in the sociology of school knowledge has not necessarily been linear, it has in essence gone through a number of phases. The first was the introduction of the importance of studying the role of ideas and consciousness, not only the occupational outcomes of the school. In England in particular, some of the more extreme versions of what was then called the “new sociology of education” seemed to assume that such “questioning of teachers’ and others’ taken for granted assumptions about prevailing curricular arrangements and pedagogical practices would not only transform education but also lead to wide-­ranging changes in the wider society” (SESCT, 1981). Though they were a bit naive politically, the impact of their position should not be dismissed. By legitimating the study of knowledge and consciousness— of culture—they set the stage for much that followed. Stimulated in part by criticisms of such a “naive possibilitarian” stand (e.g., Bernbaum, 1977; Demaine, 1977; Grierson, 1978; Sharp & Green, 1974; Whitty, 1974), a broader social theory was incorporated into the research program. This tended to be a relatively crude correspondence theory, one often based on or similar to that posited by Bowles and Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America. Here the emphasis was on the “determining effects of capitalist production relations on the nature of schooling and consciousness in capitalist societies” (SESCT, 1981, p. 3). As a consequence, somewhat less attention was paid to the power of cultural forms within the schools. Such a mechanistic theory was clearly untenable for long and in its place a more structuralist Marxist orientation developed.18 Rather than seeing the economy as determining ­everything else, with schools having little autonomy, a social formation was described as being made up of a complex totality of economic, political, and cultural/ideological practices. Instead of a base/superstructure model—in which “superstructural” institutions such as schools are seen as wholly dependent upon and controlled by the economy—these three sets of interrelated practices jointly create the conditions of existence for each other. Thus, the cultural sphere, for instance, has “relative autonomy” and has a “specific and crucial role in the functioning of the whole” (SESCT, 1981, p. 3). Theories of “over-­determination,” then, became much more visible. This may seem quite abstract, but its implications proved to be quite consequential. It once again engendered a rapid increase in the study of cultural production and reproduction. For if ideology and culture are “conceived of as having a more real autonomy than merely that which is required for the reproduction of the relations of production,” then the school curriculum and the day-­to-day social relations in schools, as sets of ideological practices, become very significant both theoretically and in terms of possibilities for action, once again (SESCT, 1981, p. 4; see also Nash, 1984). However, in recognition of the arguments made earlier about the possibly contradictory nature of the “functions” schools perform and the nature of the conflicts within and over the institution, there was (and is) now a distinct difference. Whereas before

84   Seeing Education Relationally one simply assumed a correspondence between economy and ideology, now it was realized that there might be disjunctions between the two. Reproduction was not all that was going on. Culture could, say, both reproduce and contradict economic needs. Ideologies might be inherently contradictory in and of themselves. We want to stress the importance of the fact that there has been a rapid movement away from earlier dogmatic formulations (see Apple, 1982b, on this point). As economism has been increasingly questioned, as simple base/superstructure models have come under closer scrutiny, this has brought about a considerable degree of flexibility. This has been important in a number of ways. It has brought an element of serious self­criticism into the debate over the relationship among education, culture, and economy. By showing the relatively autonomous nature of culture (and the state), and by rejecting reductive approaches which merge everything back into “functions” of a mode of production, we can much more easily unpack the specificities of each area we are studying. Finally, and perhaps most important for educators, these theoretical debates have had a crucial impact on what is seen as the efficacy of practical efforts.19 Let us be specific here. If education can be no more than an epiphenomenon tied directly to the requirements of an economy, then little can be done within education itself. It is a totally determined institution. However, if schools (and people) are not passive mirrors of an economy, but instead are active agents in reproducing and contesting dominant social relations, then understanding what they do and acting upon them becomes of no small moment. For if schools are part of a “contested terrain,” if they are part of a much larger set of political, economic, and cultural conflicts the outcomes of which are not naturally preordained to favor capital, then the hard and continuous day-­to-day struggle at the level of curriculum and teaching practice in schools is part of these larger conflicts as well. The key is linking those day-­to-day struggles within the school to other action for a more progressive society in that wider arena. This is notable tonic for the cynicism or the sense that nothing can be done in schools that has pervaded a significant portion of the critically oriented educational community over the past decade or so. Instead, the very sense of the school’s active role in re-­creating hegemonic relations that are constantly being threatened—and, hence, are in constant need of being rebuilt—opens up a whole arena for joint action with other progressive educators, parents, students, labor groups, women, people of color, and so on. Culture—commodified and lived—within the black box, then, takes an even more critical place. Investigating the role it plays—and struggling over it— becomes quite consequential. Therefore, there has been even greater interest in culturalist studies. A large number of studies have begun again to pay considerable attention to how ideology “works” in cultural materials. This research focuses on commodified culture, on the “things” of culture such as films, texts, novels, art, and so forth in an attempt to illuminate the ideological tensions, commitments, and contradictions in the material. Some of these investigations have been much more sophisticated than earlier approaches to ideological analysis, enhancing their cultural examination by drawing on the work in semiotics and literary structuralism that has grown out of European work on ideology.20 However, while certainly better than what preceded them, we need to remember that these approaches do only study one half of the cultural dynamic. As we argued, a thoroughgoing analysis of the relation between ideology and the knowledge and social

Seeing Education Relationally   85 relations of schooling must involve investigating not only the material of culture, but subjectivity as well. Process must complement product. Without this dual focus, we run the risk of forgetting something very important: the concrete activity of people. Whitty (1981) directs our attention to some of these dangers: Many post-­Althusserian writers, engaged in an attempt to elucidate more clearly the specific characteristics of ideological practice, have drawn heavily on work in linguistics and semiotics and this has led to a variety of “structuralist” approaches to reading ideology, which focus on the ways in which texts produce meaning and position human subjects through their internal structures and rules rather than their overt content. . . . Such studies often concern the ways in which texts address and position “ideal subjects,” whereas [Richard] Johnson reminds us that the actual significance of the ideological work they do depends on their relationship to “attitudes and beliefs already lived. Ideologies never address (‘interpellate’) a ‘naked subject’. . . . Concrete social individuals are always already constructed as culturally classed and sexed agents, already having a complexly formed subjectivity”. . . . In structuralist analysis, there is always a danger of “remaining locked in the ideological forms themselves and inferring effects” [and] of underplaying the significance of the “moment of self creation, of the affirmation of belief or of the giving of consent.” As such, they are in danger of producing too mechanistic a model of the formation of subjectivities.21 Thus, the active agent must take its place beside the subject who is “produced” by ideol­ogy. The tension between the two positions is constant. There is a strong relationship between ideology and the knowledge and practices of education. Ideology does have power, through both what it includes and what it excludes. It does position people within wider relations of domination and exploitation. Yet, when lived out, it also often has elements of a “good” as well as a “bad” sense in it (Johnson, 1979, p. 43). Side by side with beliefs and actions that maintain the dominance of powerful classes and groups, there are elements of serious (though perhaps incomplete) understanding: elements that see differential benefits, power, and control and penetrate close to the heart of an unequal reality. Thus, while we must continue that part of our program that analyzes the ideological content of education, we should also remember that real people with real and complex histories interact with that content. The ideological outcome is always the result of that interaction, not an act of imposition. This is a more dynamic way of looking at the question of ideological reproduction than the one that has prevailed in the literature on ideology and schooling in the past. It provides the foundations for a more complete theory of how ideology functions. In the next section of this article we will provide a concrete model which will synthesize the theoretical points we have just made.

Analyzing the Dynamics of Ideology In the previous sections we pointed out the growing sophistication of our concepts of what schools do socially. We argued that approaches that focused only on economy and not on culture, or that dealt only with cultural products and not lived cultural

86   Seeing Education Relationally processes, were incomplete. We also claimed that education is not a stable enterprise dominated by consensus, but instead is riven with ideological conflicts. These political, cultural, and economic conflicts are dynamic. They are in something like constant motion, each often acting on the others and each stemming from structurally generated antagonisms, compromises, and struggles. Given our increasingly deep understanding of the complex relationship between culture and the formation of, and/or resistance to, ideological hegemony, what does it mean for our more specific problem of ideology and education? First, rather than a unidimensional theory in which economic form is determinate, society is conceived of as being made up of three interrelated spheres: the economic, the cultural/ideological, and the political. Second, we need to be cautious about assuming that ideologies are only ideas held in one’s head. They are better thought of less as things than as social processes (Therborn, 1980, p.  vii). Nor are ideologies linear configurations, simple processes that all necessarily work in the same direction or reinforce each other. Instead, these processes sometimes overlap, compete, drown out, and even clash with each other. They are better pictured perhaps as the “cacophany of sounds and signs of a big city street than by a text serenely communicating with the solitary reader, or the teacher or TV ­personality addressing a quiet domesticated audience” (Therborn, 1980, p. viii). That there may not be “a quiet domesticated audience” points to the dialectical character of ideology. This is brought out clearly if we think about the two opposite meanings of the word “subject.” Persons can be both subjects of a ruler and the subjects of history. Each connotes a different sense—the first passive, the second active. Thus, ideologies not only subject people to a pre-­existing social order, they also qualify members of that order for social action and change. In this way, ideologies function as much more than the cement that holds society together. They empower as well as depower (Therborn, 1980, p. vii). This process of empowering is partly the result of the fact that a number of elements or dynamics are usually present at the same time in any one instance. This is important. Ideological form is not reducible to class. Processes of gender, age, and race enter directly into the ideological moment.22 It is actually out of the articulation with, clash among, or contradictions among and within, say, class, race, and sex that ideologies are lived in one’s day-­to-day life. In order to unpack how ideology works, then, we have to consider each of the spheres and the dynamics which operate within them. It may be helpful to conceptualize the intricate connections among these elements with the use of the following figure (next page). As the figure shows, each sphere of social life is constituted by the dynamics of class, race, and gender. Each of these dynamics, and each of these spheres, has its own internal history in relation to the others. Each dynamic is found in each of the spheres. Thus, to give an example, it is impossible to completely comprehend class relations in capitalism without seeing how capital uses patriarchal social relations in its organization. The current deskilling of women clerical workers through the introduction of word processing technology and the overall loss of jobs that will result among working­class women offers one instance where class and gender interact in the economy. In schools, the aforementioned fact that elementary school teachers are mostly women

Seeing Education Relationally   87 Spheres Cultural

Political

Gender Race

Dynamics

Class

Economic

who historically have come from a particular segment of the population illuminates the dual dynamics of class and gender at work again (Apple, in press). Likewise, the rejection of schooling by many black and brown youth in our urban centers, along with the sense of pride felt by many unmarried minority high school girls in their ability to bear a child, is a result of the complex interconnections among class, race, and gender oppressions and struggles at the level of the lived culture of these youth.23 Examples like these could be multiplied. Our major point is to document the relational quality of ideology. Schools are part of the economic, political, and cultural spheres. The needs of each may not always fully overlap. The dynamics which make these spheres up, therefore, also interact in everyday activity in schools. They, too, may not always reinforce each other. This makes ideological analyses a complicated endeavor since unpacking even one ideological process like that of gender is quite difficult. Integrating the others into it may be exceptionally hard. The recognition of this difficulty is important. We must not assume that simple formulations will enable us to understand the real life of our educational institutions. As we have shown here, the theories currently being debated have themselves changed markedly over time as such complications have arisen. We have no reason to believe that they will be static now, nor do we think such stasis would be helpful. We do believe, however, that only through their use in the analysis of concrete practices in concrete institutions and of the concrete stratifying processes of culture and people in schools will the field progress.

Notes   1. For more extensive analysis of this and other research approaches, see Apple (1979).   2. Apple and Taxel (1982). We have purposely set off the word “functions,” given the debate over the utility of the concept of functionality itself, since it often implies an endlessly reproductive process that is relatively conflict free with little chance of change. As will be seen later in this article, we have fundamental disagreements with this position. For criticisms of functionalist logic in education, see Apple (1982). A sophisticated version of functionalist analysis is defended, however, in Cohen (1978).   3. I am indebted to Walter Feinberg for part of this argument. See also Noble (1977) and Apple (1979; 1982c, chapter 2).   4. Much of the recent work is summarized in Kerckhoff (1980), a valuable book within the context of this research program.   5. While this is a very complex issue, the interested reader might want to follow up the

88   Seeing Education Relationally a­ rgument about how one interprets class by looking at the work of, say, recent Marxist critics of status attainment research such as that of Erik Olin Wright or some of the historical and empirical work on class formation, culture, and the labor process in Europe and the United States. See, for example, Poulantzas (1975), Edwards (1979), and Clarke, Critcher, and Johnson (1979). For a historical analysis of the role of education in class formation in the United States, see Hogan (1982).   6. Wright (1979), p. 201. See also Women’s Studies Group (1978), Reich (1981), and Omi and Winant (in press).   7. Jencks et al. (1979), pp. 174–175. It is very important to note that nearly all of these studies have been of men. They, thus, underrepresent and in part reproduce the structure of patriarchal domination in society.   8. Green (1980) makes a similar point.   9. Mouffe (1979), p. 171. See also Althusser (1971). As we shall see later, this position has been strongly criticized both politically and conceptually. 10. See especially the final chapter in Bernstein (1977). Bernstein (1982) is an even more ambitious attempt to develop a theory that would link class, culture, and ideology together. 11. We shall argue later, though, that ideology is not reducible to class dynamics. This neglects the impressive contributions made by feminist criticisms of orthodox Marxist research and theories. See Women’s Studies Group (1978) and Arnot (1981). 12. For further discussion of the complicated issue of ideological “representation” in a text, see Barrett, Corrigan, Kuhn, and Wolff (1979) and Sumner (1979). 13. These criticisms have been discussed at much greater length in Apple (1982c) and Wexler (1982). See also Giroux (1981, 1983). 14. Hebdige (1980), p.  16. See also the well-­known work of Connell, Ashendon, Kessler, and Dowsett (1982). 15. We do not mean to imply that such challenges will always be progressive. The possibility that they will not be is raised by Plotke (1980, 1981). 16. It is important to stress the fact that educational policies and practices are often the outcomes of conflict between segments of dominant classes. The way the state is currently acting to rebuild hegemonic control given the current economic, political, and cultural crisis is examined in Apple (1982a, 1982c). 17. Wexler (1981a), p. 248. While Wexler has been involved in this tradition of critical culturalist analysis, he is critical of a number of tendencies within it and argues that they must be superseded given current economic, political, and cultural conditions. See also Wexler and Whitson (1981). 18. Bowles and Gintis themselves have since criticized their initial work. See Gintis and Bowles (1981). 19. See Apple (1982c), especially chapters 1 and 6, and the discussions of the state in Carnoy and Levin (1985). 20. For further analysis and examples of this work, see Apple and Weis (1983). For further discussion of the text as a particular constellation of political, cultural, and economic practices, see Apple (1985, in press). 21. Whitty (1981), p. 16. See also Wexler (1982) and Apple and Weis (1983). 22. Therborn (1980), p. 26. See also Therborn’s interesting discussion of the necessity of linking analyses of class ideologies with those of male chauvinism on p. 38 and the more extensive analysis of the relationship among class and, especially, gender, in Apple (in press). 23. For an empirical analysis of some of these interconnections, particularly those associated with racial dynamics, see Weis (1985).

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Seeing Education Relationally   89 Apple, M. Subkoviak, & H. Lufler, Jr. (Eds.), Educational evaluation: Analysis and responsibility (pp. 3–34). Berkeley: McCutchan. Apple, M. W. (1976). Curriculum as ideological selection. Comparative Education Review, 20, 209–215. Apple, M. W. (1978). The new sociology of education: Analyzing cultural and economic reproduction. Harvard Educational Review, 48, 495–503. Apple, M. W. (1979). Ideology and curriculum. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1982a). Common curriculum and state control. Discourse, 2, 1–10. Apple, M. W. (Ed.). (1982b). Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1982c). Education and power. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W. (1985) The culture and commerce of the textbook. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 17, 147–162. Apple, M. W. (in press). Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Apple, M. W., & Taxel, J. (1982). Ideology and the curriculum. In A. Hartnett (Ed.), The social sciences and education (pp. 166–178). London: Heinemann. Apple, M. W., & Weis, L. (Eds.). (1983). Ideology and practice in schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Arnot, M. (1981). Class, gender and education. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Barrett, M., Corrigan, P., Kuhn, Α., & Wolff, J. (Eds.). (1979). Ideology and cultural production. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bernbaum, G. (1977). Knowledge and ideology in the sociology of education. New York: Macmillan. Bernstein, B. (1977). Class, codes and control, Vol. 3. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1982). Codes, modalities and the process of cultural reproduction. In M. W. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state (pp. 304–355). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Beverly Hills: Sage. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America. New York: Basic Books. Carnoy, M., & Levin, H. (1985). Schooling and work in the democratic state. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castells, M. (1980). The economic crisis and American society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clarke, J., Critcher, C., & Johnson, R. (Eds.). (1979). Working class culture. London: Hutchinson. Cohen, G. A. (1978). Karl Marx’s theory of history: A defense. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. New York: Academic Press. Connell, R. W., Ashendon, D., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin. Dale, R. (1982). Education and the capitalist state. In M. W. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state (pp.  127–161). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Demaine, J. (1977). On the new sociology of education. Economy and Society, 6, 111–144. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested terrain. New York: Basic Books. Gintis, H., & Bowles, S. (1981). Contradiction and reproduction in educational theory. In L. Barton, R. Meighan, & S. Walker (Eds.), Schooling, ideology and curriculum (pp. 51–65). Barcombe: Falmer Press. Giroux, H. (1981). Ideology, culture and the process of schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

90   Seeing Education Relationally Giroux, H. (1983). Theory and resistance in education. South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey. Green, A. (1980). Extended review. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1, 121–128. Grierson, P. C. (1978). An extended review of knowledge and control, Explorations in the politics of school knowledge, and Society, state and schooling. Educational Studies, 4, 67–84. Hall, S. (1977). Rethinking the “base and superstructure” metaphor. In J. Bloomfield (Ed.), Class, hegemony and party (pp. 43–72). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hebdige, D. (1980). Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen. Hogan, D. (1982). Education and class formation: The peculiarity of the Americans. In M.  W. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state (pp. 32–78). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jencks, C. et al. (Eds.). (1979). Who gets ahead? New York: Basic Books. Johnson, R. (1979). Histories of culture/theories of ideology. In M. Barrett, P. Corrigan, A. Kuhn, & J. Wolff (Eds.), Ideology and cultural production (pp. 49–77). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Karabel, J., & Halsey, A. H. (Eds.). (1977). Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelly, G., & Nihlen, A. (1982). Schooling and the reproduction of patriarchy. In M. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state (pp. 162–180). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kerckhoff, A. C. (1976). The status attainment process: Socialization or allocation? Social Forces, 55, 368–381. Kerckhoff, A. C. (Ed.). (1980). Research in sociology of education and socialization: Longitudinal perspectives on educational attainment. Greenwich: JAI Press. Macpherson, C. B. (1981). Do we need a theory of the state? In R. Dale, G. Esland, R. Fergusson, & M. MacDonald (Eds.), Education and the state, Vol. 1 (pp. 61–75). Sussex: Falmer Press. Meyer, J. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 55–77. Mouffe, C. (1979). Hegemony and ideology in Gramsci. In C. Mouffe (Ed.), Gramsci and Marxist theory (pp. 168–204). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Nash, R. (1984). On two critiques of the Marxist sociology of education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 5, 19–31. Navarro, V. (1976). Medicine under capitalism. New York: Neale Watson. Noble, D. (1977). America by design. New York: Knopf. O’Connor, J. (1973). The fiscal crisis of the state. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ogbu, J. (1978). Minority education and caste. New York: Academic Press. Olneck, M. R., & Bills, D. B. (1980). What makes Sammy run: An empirical assessment of the Bowles–Gintis correspondence theory. American Journal of Education, 89, 27–61. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (in press). Racial formation in the United States. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Plotke, D. (1980). The United States in transition: Toward a new order? Socialist Review, 10, 71–123. Plotke, D. (1981). The politics of transition: The United States in transition, II. Socialist Review, 11, 21–72. Poulantzas, N. (1975). Classes in contemporary capitalism. London: New Left Books. Reich, M. (1981). Racial inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sewell, W., & Hauser, R. (1980). The Wisconsin longitudinal study of social and psychological factors in aspirations and achievements. In A. C. Kerckhoff (Ed.), Research in sociology of education and socialization: Longitudinal perspectives on educational attainment (pp.  59–99). Greenwich: JAI Press. Sharp, R., & Green, A. (1974). Education and social control. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Seeing Education Relationally   91 SESCT [Society, Education and the State Course Team]. (Eds.) (1981). The politics of cultural production. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies. New York: Macmillan. Therborn, G. (1980). The ideology of power and the power of ideology. London: New Left Books. Weis, L. (1982). Educational outcomes and school processes. In P. Altbach, R. Amove, & G. Kelly (Eds.), Comparative education. New York: Macmillan. Weis, L. (1985). Between two worlds. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wexler, P. (1981a). Body and soul: Sources of social change and strategies for education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2, 247–267. Wexler, P. (1981b). Change: Social, cultural, educational. In New directions in education: Critical perspectives (Occasional paper #8). Buffalo: Department of Social Foundations and Comparative Education Center, State University of New York at Buffalo. Wexler, P. (1982). Structure, text and subject. In M. W. Apple (Ed.), Cultural and economic reproduction in education: Essays on class, ideology and the state (pp.  275–303). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wexler, P. (1983). Critical social psychology. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wexler, P., and Whitson, T. (1981). Hegemony and education. Unpublished manuscript, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. Whitty, G. (1974). Sociology and the problem of radical educational change. In M. Flude & J. Ahier (Eds.), Educability, schools and ideology (pp. 2–137). London: Croom Helm. Whitty, G. (1981). Ideology, politics and curriculum. In Society, Education and the State Course Team (Eds.), The politics of cultural production. Milton Keynes: The Open University Press. Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour. Westmead: Saxon House. Women’s Studies Group. (1978). Women take issue. London: Hutchinson. Woods, P. (1979). The divided school. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wright, E. O. (1979). Class structure and income determination. New York: Academic Press. Wright, E. O. (1980). Class and occupation. Theory and Society, 9, 177–214. Young, M. F. D. (Ed.). (1971). Knowledge and control. London: Macmillan.

5 Curricular Form and the Logic of Technical Control Commodification Returns

Exporting its major problems is not the only, or even the primary, way the state can respond to the crisis of accumulation and legitimation in which it finds itself. Given the size of its internal bureaucracy and given the intense pressures being placed upon it by economic forces at the present time, the state (and schools) can and must deal with the crisis by refocusing inwards as well. It can attempt to tighten the reins on its production of “useful” knowledge and agents for the labor force, and also on its own workforce, in ways that embody the technical and administrative knowledge and procedures employed in the advanced industrial sector of the economy. As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, the impact of this on teachers can be immense. In the last two chapters I analyzed how workers and students create and recreate lived cultures that provide the grounds for resistances to the ideologies of rationalization, technical and administrative procedures, and “needs” for control in the workplace and the school. Workers do not accept it without a struggle. Children of these workers often live out a contradictory culture in the school that “mirrors” the contradictions within the culture their parents have creatively evolved in their own experiences with both the commodification and labor processes of capital. Yet the fact that resistances have historically evolved does not mean that the fruits of these ideologies, knowledge forms, and procedures are forgotten or are not used. Instead, they are transformed. Thus, worker resistance to Taylorism and similar techniques led both to research on and the development of managerial approaches embodying human relations and to using the increased stock of technical/administrative knowledge to build control into jobs in more subtle ways. This very same history has transformed the kinds of ideologies and techniques that are now impacting on education. For given the perceived legitimacy of these managerial approaches in the economy (remember, this is where Taylorism actually succeeded in many ways) and given the fact that the state cannot escape its own current crisis in legitimacy and the larger economic crisis, the fruits of this same technical/administrative knowledge that has been transformed in the offices, factories, and businesses surrounding education will return to the school as part of the way the state perceives it must cope with these difficult problems. The production of this knowledge earlier, in part by the higher reaches of the educational apparatus, has finally led to its reintroduction to all levels of schooling later on. As we shall see here, at the same time that the state attempts to export some of its problems outside itself, it tries to deal with them in other ways by combining technical and

Curricular Form   93 industrial models with liberal discourse in its day to day operations. The combination of the languages and procedures of capital with that of the liberal discourse of person rights is even more important to education now since the pressures from the economy, from other aspects of the government, and from elsewhere will be very intense. Shifts in power within the state apparatus itself will become quite visible. Those groups within education favoring a closer alignment between schools and the needs of industry for economic and cultural capital will become increasingly powerful. At the same time, capitalists themselves will become more outspoken in their own moves to employ schools for the needs of legitimation and accumulation in the economic sphere. These kinds of shifts are occurring at the present time. Schools cannot easily ignore all this. However, and this is quite important, once again these very pressures will open up spaces for action.

Corporate Ideologies: Reaching the Teacher It does not require an exceptional amount of insight to see the current attempts by the state and industry to bring schools more closely into line with “economic needs.” Neither side of the Atlantic has been immune to these pressures. In the United Kingdom, the Great Debate and the Green Paper stand as remarkable statements to the ability of capital to marshall its forces in times of economic crisis. As the Green Paper notes: “There is a wide gap between the world of education and the world of work. Boys and girls are not sufficiently aware of the importance of industry to our society, and they are not taught much about it.”1 It goes on, making the criterion of functional efficiency the prime element in educational policy. The total resources which will be available for education and the social services in the future will depend largely on the success of the Industrial Strategy. It is vital to Britain’s economic recovery and standard of living that the performance of manufacturing industry is improved and that the whole range of Government policies, including education, contribute as much as possible to improving industrial performance and thereby increasing the national wealth.2 In the United States, where governmental policies are more highly mediated by a different articulation between the state, the economy, and schools, this kind of pressure exists in powerful ways as well. Often the workings of industry are even more visible. Chairs of Free Enterprise devoted to economic education are springing up at universities throughout the country. Teaching the message of industry has become a real force. Let me give one example taken from what is known as the Ryerson Plan, a corporate plan to have teachers spend their summers working mainly with management in industry so that they can teach their students “real knowledge” about corporate needs and benefits. The anti-­business, anti-­free-enterprise bias prevalent in many parts of our American society today is very real and is growing. Unless we quit just talking about it—and do something about it now—it will prosper and thrive in the fertile minds of our youth. It will be nurtured and fed by many teachers who have good intentions but no real knowledge of how a free market operates in a free society.

94   Curricular Form American business has a very positive story to tell and one of the most important places to start is with the youth of our country. The last 4,000 years of recorded history proves the interdependence of economic freedom and personal freedoms of all civilizations, countries and societies. We have a perfect example in a present day test tube. Take a look at Great Britain’s decline over the last 30 years. Our response is simple and effective. Reach the high school teachers of America with the true story of American business and they will carry the message to their students and their fellow teachers. The message, coming directly from the teacher, rather than books, pamphlets or films, will have a far more telling and lasting effect. Convince one teacher of the vital importance of our free enterprise system and you’re well on your way to convincing hundreds of students over a period of years. It’s the ripple effect that anti-­business factions have been capitalizing on for years.3 It is an interesting statement to say the least, one that is being echoed throughout advanced corporate economies. While it seems rather blatant, to say nothing of being historically inaccurate, we should be careful of dismissing this kind of program as overt propaganda that is easily dismissed by teachers. As one teacher said after completing it, My experience with the steel industry this summer has given me a positive and practical introduction to the business world that I might never had had, had it not been for the initiative of Ryerson management. Now I can pass a more positive portrayal of the industry on to my students; students who are usually very critical, very distrustful, and basically ignorant of the operation of big industry today.4 This is, of course, only one of many plans for getting the ideological message across. In fact, though there has been serious resistance to this kind of material by progressive forces in the United States, the movement to “teach for the needs of industry” is growing rapidly enough so that a clearinghouse, appropriately named The Institute for Constructive Capitalism, has been established at the University of Texas to make the material more available.5 Now I do not want to minimize the importance of such overt attempts at influencing teachers and students. To do so would be the height of folly. However, by keeping our focus only on these overt attempts at bringing school policy and curriculum into closer correspondence with industrial needs, we may neglect what is happening that may be just as powerful at the level of day to day school practice. One could fight the battles against capital’s overt encroachments (and perhaps win some of them) and still lose within the school itself. For as I shall argue here, for teachers and students some of the ideological and material influences of our kind of social formation are not most importantly found at the level of these kinds of documents or plans, but at the level of social practice within the routine activities of schools.6 In essence, as I pointed out earlier, I want to argue that ideologies are not only global sets of interests, things imposed by one group on another. They are embodied by our commonsense meanings and practices.7 Thus, if you want to understand ideology at work in schools, look as much at the concreta of day to day curricular and pedagogic life as you would at the statements made by spokespersons of the state or industry. To quote from Finn, Grant, and Johnson, we need to look not only at ideologies “about” education but ideologies “in” it as well.8

Curricular Form   95 I am not implying that the level of practice in schools is fundamentally controlled in some mechanistic way by private enterprise. As an aspect of the state, the school mediates and transforms an array of economic, political, and cultural pressures from competing classes and class segments. Yet we tend to forget that this does not mean that the logics, discourses, or modes of control of capital will not have an increasing impact on everyday life in our educational institutions, especially in times of “the fiscal crisis of the state.”9 This impact, clearly visible in the United States (though it is becoming more prevalent in Europe and Latin America as well), is especially evident in curriculum, in essence in some very important aspects of the actual stuff that students and teachers interact with. In this chapter, I shall be particularly interested in curricular form, not curricular content. That is, my focus will not be on what is actually taught, but on the manner in which it is organized. As a number of Marxist cultural analysts have argued, the workings of ideology can be seen most impressively at the level of form as well as what the form has in it.10 As I shall argue here, this is a key to uncovering the role of ideology “in” education. In order to understand part of what is occurring in the school and the ideological and economic pressures being placed upon and which work their way through it, as we did in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, we need to situate it within certain long-­term trends in the capital accumulation process and see its relation to changes in the labor process. Recently these trends have intensified and have had a rather major impact on a variety of areas of social life. Among these trends we can identify certain tendencies such as: the concentration and centralization of capitals; the expansion of labour processes that are based on production line technologies and forms of control; the continuing decline of “heavy industry” and the movement of capital into modern “lighter” forms of production, most notably the production of consumer durables; and major shifts in the composition of labour power—the secular tendency to “de-­ skilling,” the separation of “conception” from “execution” and the creation of new technical and control skills, the shift of labour out of direct production and into circulation and distribution, and the expansion of labour within the state.11 As we shall see, the development of new forms of control, the process of deskilling, the separation of conception from execution, are not limited to factories and offices. These tendencies intrude more and more into institutions like the school. In order to unpack this, we shall have to go even further than we did in earlier chapters in our examination of the very nature of the logic of corporate deskilling and control.

Deskilling and Reskilling At first, let me speak very generally about the nature of this kind of control. In corporate production, firms purchase labor power. That is, they buy the capacity one has to do work and, obviously, will often seek to expand the use of the labor to make it more productive. There is an opposite side to this. With the purchase of labor power goes the “right” to stipulate (within certain limits) how it is to be used, without too much interference or participation by workers in the conception and planning of the work.12 How

96   Curricular Form this has been accomplished has not stayed the same, of course. Empirically, there has been a changing logic of control that has sought to accomplish these ends. Given this history, it is helpful to differentiate the kinds of control that have been used. I shall simplify these around basic ideal types for ease of understanding. We can distinguish three kinds of control that can be employed to help exact more work—simple, technical, and bureaucratic. Simple control is exactly that, simply telling someone that you have decided what should go on and they should follow or else. Technical controls are less obvious. They are controls embedded in the physical structure of your job. A good example again is the use of numerical control technology in the machine industry where a worker inserts a card into a machine and it directs the pace and skill level of the operation. Thus, the worker is meant to be simply an attendant to the machine itself. And, finally, bureaucratic control signifies a social structure where control is less visible since the principles of control are embodied within the hierarchical social relations of the workplace. Impersonal and bureaucratic rules concerning the direction of one’s work, the procedures for evaluating performance, and sanctions and rewards are dictated by officially approved policy.13 Each of these modes of control has grown in sophistication over the years, though simple control has tended to become less important as the size and complexity of production has increased. The long period of experimentation by industry on the most successful modes of controlling production led to a number of conclusions. Rather than simple control where control is openly exercised by supervisors or persons in authority (and hence could possibly be subverted by blue- or white-­collar workers), power could be “made invisible” by incorporating it into the very structure of the work itself. This meant the following things. The control must come from what seems to be a legitimate overall structure. It must be concerned with the actual work, not based on features extraneous to it (like favoritism and so on). Perhaps most importantly, the job, the process, and the product should be defined as precisely as possible on the basis of management’s, not the worker’s, control over the specialized knowledge needed to carry it out.14 This often entailed the development of technical control. Technical control and deskilling tend to go hand in hand. As we saw in Chapter 3, deskilling is part of a long process in which labor is divided and then redivided to increase productivity, to reduce “inefficiency,” and to control both the cost and the impact of labor. It usually has involved taking relatively complex jobs (most jobs are much more complex and require more decision-­making than people give them credit for), jobs that require no small amount of skill and decision-­making, and breaking them down into specified actions with specified results so that less skilled and costly personnel can be used, or so that the control of work pace and outcome is enhanced. The assembly line is, of course, one of the archetypical examples of this process. At its beginnings, deskilling tended to involve techniques such as Taylorism and various time and motion studies. Though these strategies for the division and control of labor were less than totally successful (and in fact often generated a significant amount of resistance and conflict),15 they did succeed in helping to legitimate a style of control based in large part on deskilling. One of the more effective strategies has been the incorporation of control into the actual productive process itself. Thus, machinery in factories is now often designed so that the machinist is called upon to do little more than load and unload the machine. In offices, word-­processing technology is employed to reduce labor costs and deskill

Curricular Form   97 women workers. Thus, management attempts to control both the pace of the work and the skills required, to increase more effectively their profit margins or productivity. Once again, as the history of formal and informal labor resistance documents, this kind of strategy—the building of controls into the very warp and weft of the production process has been contested.16 However, the growing sophistication by management and the state bureaucrats in the use of technical control procedures is apparent.17 I have mentioned that deskilling is a complex process as it works its way through a variety of economic and cultural institutions. Yet it really is not that hard to grasp one of its other important aspects. When jobs are deskilled, the knowledge that once accompanied it, knowledge that was controlled and used by workers in carrying out their day to day lives on their jobs, goes somewhere. As I demonstrated in Chapter 3 management attempts (with varying degrees of success) to accumulate and control this assemblage of skills and knowledge. It attempts, in other words, to separate conception from execution. The control of knowledge enables management to plan; ideally, the worker should merely carry these plans out to the specifications, and at the pace, set by people away from the actual point of production. But deskilling is accompanied by something else, what might be called reskilling. New techniques are required to run new machines; new occupations are created as the redivision of labor goes on. Fewer skilled craftspersons are needed and their previous large numbers are replaced by a smaller number of technicians with different skills who oversee the machinery.18 This process of deskilling and reskilling is usually spread out over the landscape of an economy so it is rather difficult to trace out the relationships. It is not very usual that you can see it going on at a level of specificity that makes it clear, since while one group is being deskilled another group, often separated by time and geography, is being reskilled. However, one particular institution—the school—provides an exceptional microcosm for seeing these kinds of mechanisms of control in operation. In examining this we should remember that capitalist production has developed unevenly, so that certain areas of our social institutions will vary in the kind of control being used. Some institutions will be more resistant than others to the logic of corporate rationalization. Given the relatively autonomous nature of teaching (one can usually close one’s door and not be disturbed) and given the internal history of the kinds of control in the institution (paternalistic styles of administration, often in the USA based on gender relations), the school has been partly resistant to technical and bureaucratic control, at the level of actual practice, until relatively recently. This “relative autonomy” may be breaking down today.19 For just as the everyday discourse and patterns of interaction in the family and in, say, the media are increasingly being subtly transformed by the logic and contradictions of dominant ideologies,20 so too is the school a site where these subtle ideological transformations occur. I shall claim that this goes on through a process of technical control. As we shall now see, these logics of control can have a rather profound impact on schools.

Controlling Curricular Form The best examples of the encroachment of technical control procedures are found in the exceptionally rapid growth in the use of prepackaged sets of curricular materials. It is nearly impossible now to walk into an American classroom, for instance, without

98   Curricular Form seeing boxes upon boxes of science, social studies, mathematics, and reading materials (“systems,” as they are sometimes called) lining the shelves and in use.21 Here, a school system usually purchases a total set of standardized material, one that includes statements of objectives, all of the curricular content and material needed, prespecified teacher actions and appropriate student responses, and diagnostic and achievement tests coordinated with the system. Usually, these tests have the curricular knowledge “reduced” to “appropriate” behaviors and skills. This emphasis on skills will become rather significant later on in my discussion. Let me give one example, actually taken from one of the better of the widely used curricular systems, of the numerous sets of materials that are becoming the standard fare in American elementary schools. It is taken from Module One of Science: A Process Approach. The notion of module is important here. The material is prepackaged into cardboard boxes with attractive colors. It is divided into 105 separate modules, each of which includes a set of pregiven concepts to teach. The material specifies all of the goals. It includes everything a teacher “needs” to teach, has the pedagogical steps a teacher must take to reach these goals already built in, and has the evaluation mechanisms built into it as well. But that is not all. Not only does it prespecify nearly all a teacher should know, say, and do, but it often lays out the appropriate student responses to these elements as well. To make this clear, here is one sequence taken from the material that lays out the instructional procedure, student response, and evaluative activity. It concerns colors. As each child arrives at school, fasten a red, yellow, or blue paper rectangle on the child’s shirt or dress. . . . Comment on the color of the paper and ask the child to say the name of the color he or she is wearing. . . . Put thirty yellow, red, and blue paper squares in a large bag or small box. Show the children three paper plates: one marked red, one yellow, and one blue. (See Materials for suggestions on marking.) These colors should closely match those in the bag. Ask the children to come forward, a few at a time, and let each child take one square from the bag and place it on the plate marked with the matching color. [A picture of this with a child picking out paper from a box and putting it on a plate is inserted here in the material so that no teacher will get the procedure wrong.] As each child takes a colored square, ask him to name the color of that square. If the child hesitates, name it for him.22 In the curricular material, everything except the bag or box is included—all the plates and colored paper. (The cost, by the way, is $14.00 for the plan and the paper.) I noted that not only were the curricular and pedagogical elements prespecified, but all other aspects of teachers’ actions were included as well. Thus, in the “Appraisal” of this module, the teacher is asked to: Ask each of six children to bring a box of crayons and sit together. . . . Ask each child to point to his red crayon when you say the word red. Repeat this for all six colors. Ask each child to match one crayon with one article of clothing that someone else is wearing. . . . Before each group of children leaves the activity, ask each child individually to name and point to the red, blue, and yellow crayon.23

Curricular Form   99 Even with this amount of guidance, it is still “essential” that we know for each child whether he or she has reached the appropriate skill level. Thus, as the final element, the material has competency measures built into it. Here the specification reaches its most exact point, giving the teacher the exact words he or she should use: Task 1: Show the child a yellow cube and ask, What is the color of this cube? This is done for each color. Then, after arranging orange, green, and purple cubes in front of a child, the material goes on. Task 4: Say, Put your finger on the orange cube. Task 5: Say, Put your finger on the green cube. Task 6: Say, Put your finger on the purple cube.24 I have gone on at length here so that you can get a picture of the extent to which technical control enters into the life of the school. Little in what might be metaphorically called the “production process” is left to chance. In many ways, it can be considered a picture of deskilling. Let us look at this somewhat more closely. My point is not to argue against the specific curricular or pedagogical content of this kind of material, though an analysis of this certainly would be interesting.25 Rather, it is to have us focus on the form itself. What is this doing? For notice what has happened here. The goals, the process, the outcome, and the evaluative criteria for assessing them are defined as precisely as possible by people external to the situation. In the competency measure at the end of the module, this extends to the specification of even the exact words the teacher is to say. Notice as well the process of deskilling at work here. Skills that teachers used to need, that were deemed essential to the craft of working with children—such as curriculum deliberation and planning, designing teaching and curricular strategies for specific groups and individuals based on intimate knowledge of these people—are no longer as necessary. With the large-­scale influx of prepackaged material, planning is separated from execution. The planning is done at the level of the production of both the rules for use of the material and the material itself. The execution is carried out by the teacher. In the process, what were previously considered valuable skills slowly atrophy because they are less often required.26 But what about the element of reskilling that I mentioned earlier was essential to understand how ideological forms can penetrate to the heart of institutions like the school? Unlike the economy where deskilling and reskilling are not usually found operating at one and the same moment with one and the same people, in the school this seems to be exactly the case. As the procedures of technical control enter into the school in the guise of predesigned curricular/teaching/evaluation “systems,” teachers are being deskilled. Yet they are also being reskilled in a way that is quite consequential. We can see signs of this at both teacher training institutions, in in-­service workshops and courses, in the journals devoted to teachers, in funding and enrollment patterns, and not least in the actual curricular materials themselves. While the deskilling involves the loss of craft, the ongoing atrophication of educational skills, the reskilling involves the substitution of the skills and ideological visions of management. The

100   Curricular Form growth of behavior modification techniques and classroom management strategies and their incorporation within both curricular material and teachers’ repertoires signifies these kinds of alterations. That is, as teachers lose control of the curricular and pedagogic skills to large publishing houses, these skills are replaced by techniques for better controlling students. This is not insignificant in its consequences for both teachers and students. Since the material is often organized around and employs specified outcomes and procedures and these are built into this kind of material itself (with its many worksheets and frequent tests), it is “individualized” in many ways. Students can engage in it themselves with little overt interaction on the part of the teacher or each other as they become more used to the procedures, which are usually highly standardized. The students’ progress through the system can be individualized, at least according to speed; and this focus on individualizing the speed (usually through worksheets and the like) at which a student proceeds through the system is becoming even more pronounced in newer curricular systems. Since the control is technical—that is, management strategies are incorporated into it as a major aspect of the pedagogical/curricular/evaluative “machinery” itself—the teacher becomes something of a manager. This is occurring at the same time that the objective conditions of his or her work are becoming increasingly “proletarianized” due to the curricular form’s logic of technical control. This is a unique situation and certainly needs further thought. The possible effect of these forms of technical control on the students is just as serious and is something to which I shall return shortly. Yet there are important consequences besides the deskilling and reskilling that are occurring. As the literature on the labor process reminds us, the progressive division and control of labor also has an impact at the level of social relations, on how the people involved interact. While this has had a momentous effect in factories and offices, its effects will undoubtedly be felt in the school too. And as in the workplace, the impact may have contradictory results. Let me be more specific here. With the increasing employment of prepackaged curricular systems as the basic curricular form, virtually no interaction between teachers is required. If nearly everything is rationalized and specified before execution, then contact among teachers about actual curricular matters is minimized.27 If such technical control is effective, that is, if teachers actually respond in ways that accept the separation of planning from execution, then one would expect results that go beyond this “mere” separation. One would expect, at the level of classroom practice, that it will be more difficult for teachers jointly to gain informal control over curricular decisions because of their increasing isolation. In essence, if everything is predetermined, there is no longer any pressing need for teacher interaction. Teachers become unattached individuals, divorced from both colleagues and the actual stuff of their work. However, and here is part of what I mean by a contradictory effect, while this may be an accurate estimation of one of the results of technical control on one level, it forgets that most systems of control embody contradictions within themselves. For instance, while deskilling, forms of technical control, and the rationalization of work have created isolated individuals in, say, factories, historically they have often generated contradictory pressures as well. The use of technical control has often brought unionization in its wake.28 Even given the ideology of professionalism (an ideology that

Curricular Form   101 might make it difficult for collective struggles to evolve), which tends to dominate certain sectors of the teaching force, other state employees who in the past have thought of themselves as professionals have gained a greater collective sense in response to similar modes of control. Thus, the loss of control and knowledge in one arena may generate countervailing tendencies in another. We cannot know yet how this will turn out. These contradictory results only emerge over long periods of time. In industry, it took decades for such an impact to be felt. The same will no doubt be true in schools.

Accepting Technical Control So far in this chapter, I have looked at teachers as if they were workers. That is, I have argued that the processes that act on blue- and white-­collar workers in the larger social arena will and are entering into the cultural forms that are considered legitimate in schools. Yet schools, because of their internal history, are different in some very important ways from factories and offices, and teachers are still very different from other workers in terms of the conditions of their work. Products are not as visible (except much later on in the rough reproduction of a labor force, in the production and reproduction of ideologies, and in the production of the technical/administrative knowledge “required” by an economy)29 as in offices and factories. Teachers have what Erik Olin Wright has called a “contradictory class location” and hence cannot be expected to react in the same ways as the workers and employees of large corporations.30 Furthermore, there are children who act back on teachers in ways an automobile on an assembly line or a paper on a desk cannot.31 Finally, teaching does not take place on a line, but goes on in separate rooms more often than not. All of these conditions do not mean that schools are immune or autonomous from the logic of capital. The logic will be mediated (in part due to the school as a state apparatus); it will enter where it can in partial, distorted, or coded ways. Given the specific differences of schools from other workplaces, a prime moment in its entry can be found less at the level of overt or simple controls (do this because I say so) or at the level of bureaucratic form (because individual teachers can still be relatively free from those kinds of encroachments).32 These controls will go on, of course; but they may be less consequential than the encoding of technical control into the very basis of the curricular form itself. The level of curricular, pedagogic, and evaluative practice within the classroom can be controlled by the forms into which culture is commodified in schools. If my arguments are correct, then how are we to understand the acceptance and growth of this process of control? These forms enter into schools not because of any conspiracy on the part of industrialists to make our educational institutions serve the needs of capital, as in the earlier quotes from the Green Paper and the Ryerson Plan. It occurs in large part because schools are a rather lucrative market. These sets of material are published by firms who aggressively market where there is a need, or where they can create needs. It is simply good business practice in terms of profit margins to market material of this type, especially since the original purchase of the “system” or set of modules means increasing purchases over the years. Let me explain this by comparing it to another arena where similar techniques are employed to increase capital accumulation. Think of shaving.

102   Curricular Form Large razor blade manufacturers sell razors at below cost, or even sometimes give them away as promotional “gimmicks,” because they believe that once you buy the razor you will continue to buy their blades and their upgraded version year after year. In the curricular systems we are considering here, the purchase of the modules (though certainly not cheap by any stretch of the imagination) with their sets of standardized disposable material means the same thing. One “needs” to continue to purchase the work and test sheets, the chemicals, the correctly colored and shaped paper, the publishers’ replacements of outmoded material and lessons, etc. Profits are heightened with every replacement that is bought. Since replacement purchases are often bureaucratically centralized, because of budget control, in the office of the administrator, the additional material is usually bought from the producer (often at exorbitant costs) not gotten from one’s local store. Thus, as with other industries, this “good business sense” means that high volume, the standardization of each of the elements of one’s product and of its form, product upgrading, and then the stimulation of replacement purchasing are essential to maintain profits.33 Yet the notion of aggressive marketing and good business sense is but a partial explanation of this growth. In order to comprehend fully the acceptance of technical control procedures embodied in curricular form, we need to know something of the history of why these kinds of materials evolved in the first place. Let me note these briefly. The original introduction of prepackaged material was stimulated by a specific network of political, cultural, and economic forces, originally in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. The views of academics that teachers were unsophisticated in major curriculum areas “necessitated” the creation of what was called teacher-­proof material. The cold war climate (created and stimulated by the state in large part) led to a focus on the efficient production of scientists and technicians as well as a relatively stable work-­force; thus, the “guaranteeing” of this production through the school curriculum became of increasing import.34 On top of this was the decision of the educational apparatus of the state, under the National Defense Education Act, to provide the equivalent of cash credits to local school districts for the purchase of new curricula created by the “private sector” to increase this efficiency. At the same time, the internal dynamics within education played a part since behavioral and learning psychology—on whose principles so much of these systems rely—gained increasing prestige in a field like education where being seen as a science was critically important both for funding and to deflect criticism,35 thereby enhancing its legitimacy within the state apparatus and to the public. In the more recent past, the increasing influence of industrial capital within the executive and legislative branches of government, as well as in the attendant bureaucracy,36 no doubt is an essential element here since there is recent evidence that the federal government has backed away from the widespread production and distribution of large-­scale curricula, preferring to stimulate the “private sector” to enter even more deeply into such production.37 This gives us a brief sense of history, but why the continued movement toward this today? A key element here is seeing the school as an aspect of the state apparatus. For the state’s need for consent as well as control means that the forms of control in school will be encoded in particular ways.38

Curricular Form   103 The strategic import of the logic of technical control in schools lies in its ability to integrate into one discourse what are often seen as competing ideological movements, and, hence, to generate consent from each of them. The need for accountability and control by administrative managers, the real needs of teachers for something that is “practical” to use with their students, the interest of the state in efficient production and cost savings,39 the concerns of parents for “quality education” that “works” (a concern that will be coded differently by different classes and class segments), industrial capital’s own requirements for efficient production and so on, can be joined. It is here again that one can see how two important functions of the state can be accomplished. The state can assist in capital accumulation by attempting to provide a more efficient “production process” in schools. At the same time, it can legitimate its own activity by couching its discourse in language that is broad enough to be meaningful to each of what it perceives to be important constituencies, yet specific enough to give some practical answers to those who, like teachers, “require” it. The fact that the form taken by these curricular systems is tightly controlled and more easily made “accountable,” that it is usually individualized (an important ideological element in the culture of the new petty bourgeoisie), that it focuses on skills in a time of perceived crisis in the teaching of “basic skills,” etc., nearly guarantees its acceptability to a wide array of classes and interest groups. Thus, the logic of control is both mediated and reinforced by the needs of state bureaucrats for accountable and rational procedures and by the specific nexus of forces acting on the state itself. The curriculum form will take on the aspects that are necessary to accomplish both accumulation and legitimation.40 As Clarke puts it: Even where institutions meet a logic required by capital, their form and direction are never the outcome of a simple unidirectional imposition by capital. They involve a complex political work of concession and compromise, if only to secure the legitimacy of the state in popular opinion.41 This is exactly what has occurred in the use of this kind of curricular form.

The Possessive Individual So far I have examined the encroachment into the work of teachers of the technical control systems embodied in curricular form. Yet teachers are not the only actors in the setting where we find this material. There are the students as well. A number of writers have noted that each kind of social formation “requires” a particular kind of individual. Williams and others, for instance, have helped us trace the growth of the abstract individual as it developed within the theoretic, cultural, and economic practices of capitalism.42 These are not simply changes in definition of the individual, but imply changes in our actual modes of material and cultural producing, reproducing, and consuming. To be an individual in our society signifies a complex interconnection between our day to day meanings and practices and an “external” mode of production. While I do not mean to imply a simple base/superstructure model here, it is clear that in some very important ways there is a dialectical relationship between economic and ideological form. As Gramsci and others would put it,

104   Curricular Form i­ deological hegemony sustains class domination; subjectivities cannot be seen as unrelated to structure. Yet the questions remain: How are they related? Where are the sites where this relationship is worked out? The school provides a critical point at which one can see these things working out. As Richard Johnson notes, “It is not so much a question that schools . . . are ideology, more that they are the sites where ideologies are produced in the form of subjectivities.”43 But what kind of subjectivity, what kind of ideology, what kind of individual may be produced here? The characteristics embodied in the modes of technical control built into the curricular form itself are ideally suited to reproduce the possessive individual, a vision of oneself that lies at the ideological heart of corporate economies. The conception of individualism located in the material we have been examining is quite similar to those found in other analyses of aspects of the cultural apparatus in our society. As Will Wright has demonstrated, for example, in his recent investigation of the role of cultural artifacts like film as carriers and legitimators of ideological changes, important aspects of our cultural apparatus represent a world in which the society recognizes each member as an individual; but that recognition is dependent almost entirely upon technical skills. At the same time, while heightening the value of technical competence, these films direct the individual to reject the importance of ethical and political values through their form. They portray an individualism, situated in the context of a corporate economy, in which “respect and companionship are to be achieved only by becoming a skilled technician.” The individual accepts and does any technical job that is offered and has loyalty to only those with similar technical competence not primarily “to any competing social and community values.”44 An examination of these curricular “systems” illuminates the extent to which this kind of ideological movement is occurring in increasingly dominant curricular forms. Here, the rate at which a student proceeds is individualized; however, the actual product as well as the process to be accomplished are specified by the material itself.45 Thus, it is not “just” the teacher who faces the encroachment of technical control and deskilling. The students’ responses are largely prespecified as well. Much of this growing arsenal of material attempts as precisely as possible to specify appropriate student language and action as well, often reducing it to the mastery of sets of competencies or skills. Here Wright seems correct. The notion of reducing curriculum to a set of skills is not unimportant in this regard since it is part of the larger process by which the logic of capital helps build identities and transforms cultural meanings and practices into commodities.46 That is, if knowledge in all its aspects (of the logical type of that, how, or to—i.e., information, pro­ cesses, and dispositions or propensities) is broken down and commodified, like economic capital it can be accumulated. The mark of a good pupil is the possession and accumulation of vast quantities of skills in the service of technical interests. As an ideological mechanism in the maintenance of hegemony this is rather interesting. In the larger society, people consume as isolated individuals. Their worth is determined by the possession of material goods or, as Will Wright noted, of technical skills. The accumulation of such goods or of the “cultural capital” of technical competence—here atomistic bits of knowledge and skills measured on pre-­tests and post-­tests—is a technical procedure, one that requires only the mastery of the prior necessary technical skills and enough time to follow the rules, at one’s own pace, to their conclusion. It is

Curricular Form   105 the message of the new petty bourgeoisie writ large on the ideological terrain of the school, one that may actually lead to its rejection by students from other classes and class segments in the day to day life of students in school. In fact, one might hypothesize just this, that this kind of movement speaks to the increasing importance in the cultural apparatus of the ideologies of class segments with contradictory class locations, in particular what I have called the new petty bourgeoisie—those groups who make up middle management and technical occupations.47 The particular kind of individualism we are witnessing here is an interesting shift from an ideology of individual autonomy, where a person is his or her own boss and controls his or her destiny, to a careerist individualism. Here the individualism is geared towards organizational mobility and advancement by following technical rules. As Erik Olin Wright puts it, for the new petty bourgeoisie “individualism is structured around the requirements of bureaucratic advancement.”48 It may also be a coded “reflection” of the increasing proletarianization of white-­collar work. For while previously individualism signified some serious sense of autonomy over how one worked and what one produced, for a large portion of white-­collar employees autonomy has been trivialized.49 The rate at which one works may be individualized, but the work itself, how it is accomplished, and what the exact specifications of the final product will be, are increasingly being specified. At this stage, we are left with many questions. When technical control means that the form that the curriculum takes is highly specified, that it is individualized to such an extent that there is little required interaction among the students so that each activity is by necessity viewed as an individual intellectual act of skill, that answers often take the form of simple physical activities (as we saw in the module I discussed earlier), that answers are either correct or incorrect based on the application of technical rules, and this kind of form is what one follows throughout one’s elementary school life, what impact does it have on the teachers and students who interact with it at the level of practice each day? We do have evidence to suggest what procedures of this type do to workers in industry and in offices. In many cases, even given the development of a work culture that provides a grounding for cultural forms of resistance, increasing rationalization and a more sophisticated level of control over a long period of time tends to encourage people to manifest an interesting array of traits: a “rules orientation”—that is, an awareness of rules and procedures and a habit of following them; greater dependability—that is, performing a job at a relatively consistent level, being reliable, and getting the job done even when rules have to be modified a bit to meet changing day to day conditions; and, the “internalization of the enterprise’s goals and values”—that is, conflict is minimized and slowly but surely, there tends to be a homogenization of overt interests between management and employees.50 Will this happen in schools as well? This clearly points to the significance of engaging in analyses of what actually happens within the black box of the school. Do teachers and students accept this? Will the gradual introduction of the logic of technical control generate resistances, if only on a cultural level? Will class and work cultures similar to these we examined in Chapters 3 and 4 contradict, mediate, or even transform the expected outcomes? It is to this that we shall now turn.

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Resistances I have not presented an optimistic appraisal here. As the activities of students are increasingly specified, as the rules, processes, and standard outcomes are integrated through and rationalized by the materials themselves, so too are teachers deskilled, reskilled, and anonymized. Students work on material whose form both isolates individuals from each other and establishes the conditions of existence for the possessive individual; the form of the material and the embedded nature of the technical control process does nearly the same for the teacher. Surrounded by a specific logic of control, the objective force of the social relations embodied in the form itself tends to be quite powerful. Yet I am not arguing for a crude kind of functionalist perspective, where everything is measured by, or is aimed toward, its ability to reproduce an existing static society. The creation of the kind of ideological hegemony “caused” by the increasing introduction of technical control is not “naturally” pre-­ordained. It is something that is won or lost in particular conflicts and struggles.51 On the one hand, teachers will be controlled. As one teacher said about a set of popular material even more integrated and rationalized than the ones I have pointed to here, “Look, I have no choice. I personally don’t like this material, but everyone in the district has to use this series. I’ll try to do other things as well, but basically our curriculum will be based on this.” On the other hand, resistances will be there. This same teacher who disagreed with the curriculum but used it, also was partially subverting it in interesting ways. It was employed only three days a week instead of the five days that were specified. As the teacher put it, “Listen, if we worked hard we’d finish this stuff in two or three months and besides it’s sometimes confusing and boring. So I try to go beyond it as often as possible, as long as I do not teach what is in the material to be covered by this series next year.” Thus, as we can see from this last part of her comment, internal conditions make such overt resistances more difficult. Yet these internal conditions need not preclude teachers from also making these commodified cultural forms their own, to generate their own creative responses to dominant ideologies, in a manner similar to what the counter-­cultural groups studies by Marxist ethnographers have done to commodified culture. These groups transformed and reinterpreted the products they bought and used so that they became tools for the creation of alternative pockets of resistance.52 Students and teachers may also find methods of creatively using these systems in ways undreamed of by state bureaucrats or corporate publishing. (I must admit, however, that my repeated observations in classrooms over the last years make one less than totally optimistic that this will always or even very often be the case.) Other elements in the environment may provide the site for different meanings and practices to evolve, though, even within the curricular form itself. For we should remember that there may be progressive elements within the content of the curriculum that contradict the messages of the form.53 The very fact that industrialists are interested in content, speaks to the import of content as a contested area. And it is in the interaction between the content, the form, and the lived culture of the students that subjectivities are formed. No element in this set of relations can be ignored.

Curricular Form   107 While I have focused on the form of the material here, it is important to specify in somewhat more detail what is entailed in analyzing the possible contradictions between form and content. An ideological “reading” of any material is not a simple matter. Such a reading in fact cannot be limited to content analysis, to what a “text” simply and openly “says,” especially if we are interested in the grounds upon which resistance may be generated. In this regard, our analyses could profit immensely from the incorporation of the work of people such as Barthes, Macherey, Derrida, and other investigators of the process of signification and impact of ideology on cultural production. Thus, to complete our analyses of content, we would need to engage in a semiological reading of the cultural artifact to “extract the structure of significations within the object which provides the parameter” for possible readings of it.54 This is not to imply that all possible readings can be specified. One must still be aware, as Derrida argues for instance, that reading a text is an active process of signification. As one commentator puts it, this active process “decentres the orthodox, customary meaning of the discourse by its invocation of other, less orthodox, private meanings and references.”55 Thus, every discourse, all content, may have a “surplus of meaning.” This surplus can create a “play” in the process of signification, so that while each element in the text may have “normal” ways in which it is used, it also refers to other possible meanings at the same time. I want to stress this point. Interrogation of the content itself is important not just to see what ideologies are “expressed” or “represented” in the material itself (the notion of representation being an inherently complex and difficult one in the first place), but so that we can begin to both unpack the way any content “is itself part of an active process of signification through which meaning is produced”56 and understand the possible contradictions within the content, the text, itself. In his discussion of the lack of analyses of contradiction in studies of the content of cultural products like the media, Hill makes a similar point. If the media do not merely express ideologies, they must then be considered as actively constitutive of ideologies. That is to say, ideologies are not merely ingredients to be detected in the media, but also its products. And again, as active productions, ideologies are not merely to be seen as sets of positivities but also as processes of exclusion—with these “exclusions” potentially being able to feed back to disturb or deform their progenitive system (and thereby furnishing our analysis with a notion of “contradiction” retrieved from both a reductionism which would merely place it as a reflection of contradictions determined at the level of the economic and the homeostasis of a reproduction-­oriented Marxist functionalism).57 As Hill implies in the above quote, the “meaning” of the content is not only to be found in the text or cultural product itself, in its codes and regularities (though such a reading is an essential part of a complete analysis). The meaning is also constituted “in the interaction between the text and its users,”58 in our own case between curriculum content and student. This still is incomplete, though. As Hill also states, a key is the notion of exclusion. Cultural products not only “say,” but they “don’t say” as well. The fact that one needs to investigate not only “what material says” and its surplus of meaning, contradictions,

108   Curricular Form and structures of signification but also what it excludes is brought home by people such as Macherey and Eagleton. As both have noted, any text is not necessarily constituted by readily evident meanings—those positivities that Hill talked about in the prior quote from him—that are easily seen by an observer. Rather, a text “bears inscribed within it the marks of certain determinate absences which twist its significations into conflict and contradiction.” The not said of a work is as important as the said since “ideology is present in the text in the form of its eloquent silences.”59 In brief, then, to examine adequately the possible contradictions between form and content in these curricular materials we would be required to unpack what is present and missing within the content itself, what structures provide the parameters for possible readings of it, what “dissonances” and contradictions exist within it that provide for alternate readings, and finally the interactions between content and the lived culture of the reader.60 This last point about the lived culture of the actors, the students themselves, needs to be stressed, for we must remember their lived cultures that were described earlier. One would expect resistances to the ideological practices I have discussed in this chapter on the part of the students as well as teachers, resistances that may be specific by race, gender, and class. My earlier quote from Johnson is correct here. The formation of ideologies—even those of the kind of individualism I have examined in this analysis—is not a simple act of imposition. It is produced by concrete actors and embodied in lived experiences that may resist, alter, or mediate these social messages.61 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter’s analysis of the lived culture of particular segments of the working class, for instance, working-­class youth partly defeat the ideology of individualism. The same was true for many women and “minority” students. While we can and must focus on these resistances, though, their actual meaning may be unclear. Do they, like those of the aforementioned lads, kids, and girls, also reproduce at an even deeper level ideological meanings and practices that provide quite powerful supports to relations of domination? This requires much more study. Take teachers, for example. While technical controls could possibly lead to unionization, within the school most resistances that occur will be, by necessity, on an individual not a collective level because of the very social relations generated by the curricular form itself.62 The effects, hence, can be rather contradictory. We must remember as well that, as I mentioned earlier, these more “invisible” modes of control may be accepted if they are perceived as coming from a legitimate over-­all structure. The fact that curriculum selection committees give teachers a say in the curriculum they will employ means that some of the prior conditions for the consent necessary for this kind of control to be successful have already been laid. The choice is made, in part, by the teachers themselves. It is hard to argue in the face of that. This affects the level of content once again. While the ideology of choice remains, teachers and even parent advisory groups are usually limited in their choices to sets of textual or prepackaged curricular material published by the relatively few major corporate publishing concerns that aggressively market their products. While numerically one’s choices may be high, often there will be little difference among the curricular materials from which one can choose. At the level of content, especially in elementary schools, perceived ideological differences over race, sex, and class in the communities in which publishers want to sell their products will provide substantial

Curricular Form   109 limits on what is considered “legitimate” (or safe) knowledge. After all, the production of these curricular materials is a business. In the United States, as well, most texts and predesigned curricular materials are produced with state adoption policies in mind. That is, a number of states maintain approved lists of material. Those districts purchasing from the approved list will have their costs partly reimbursed by the state. Getting one’s products on that list is quite important, therefore, since a substantial profit is nearly guaranteed. Conspiracies to eliminate provocative or honest material are not necessary here. The internal working of an educational apparatus, in conjunction with both the political economy of publishing and the fiscal crisis of the state, is sufficient to homogenize the core of the curriculum. This is not to deny the power of industry in making its case the fundamental problem schools are to face or to deny capital’s power in comparison to other groups. Rather, it is to claim that this power is highly mediated and works its way through schooling in ways that are not always identical to its original intent. The effect may be relative ideological homogenization, but to say that this is ultimately what industry wants is to substitute a logic of cause and effect for what is, instead, a particular conjuncture of ideological, cultural, political, and economic forces and conflicts that “creates” the conditions of existence of the material. Yet this very process of determination can be contradictory, in part because of the fiscal crisis faced by school systems. Once the curriculum is in place, the original subsid­ized costs become fixed costs assumed by the local school district. As school budgets are voted down more and more, money is not made available to purchase new material or replace outdated ones. Any “surplus” money tends to go into the ongoing purchase of the consumable material required by the prepackaged curriculum. One is slowly left with expensive “dinosaurs.” The economics of this are essential if we are to see the contradictory pressures this will evoke. Since the state apparatus has expanded the range of participation in curriculum decision-­making by creating selection committees (which sometimes now include parents as well as teachers), yet the selected material can often not be replaced because of its expense later on, the state opens up new spaces of opposition.63 The growth of the discourse of rights of selection (a right that now cannot be acted upon in any significant way) is objectively at odds with the economic context in which the state currently finds itself. It thereby transforms the issue into a potentially volatile one, in much the same way as was shown by my discussion in Chapter 4 of the contradictory relationship between the liberal discourse of rights and the “needs” of advanced capitalism.64 These potential conflicts, however, may be mitigated by rather powerful economic and ideological conditions that may seem all too real to many of the individuals employed within the state. And the very same pressures may have important and similar implications for those teachers who may in fact recognize the impact that rationalization and control are having on them. It is easy to forget something: that this is not a good time, ideologically or econom­ ically, for teachers who engage in overt resistances. Given a difficult ideological climate and given the employment situation among teachers today—with thousands having either been laid off or living under the threat of it—the loss of control can progress in a relatively unthreatened way. Deskilling and reskilling, progressive anonymization and  rationalization, the transformation of educational work, somehow seem less

110   Curricular Form c­ onsequential than such economic concerns as job security, salary, etc., even though they may seem to us to be clearly part of the same dynamic. When all this is said, though, we must recognize that these powerful social messages, while embedded in the actual experiences of teachers and students as they go about their day to day lives in classrooms, are highly mediated by other elements. The fact that individual teachers like most other workers may develop patterns of resistance to these patterns of technical control at the informal cultural level alters these messages. The contradictory ideologies of individualism and cooperativeness that are naturally generated out of the crowded conditions of many classrooms (you can’t be an isolated individual all the time when there are twenty or thirty other people around with whom one teacher must cope) also provide countervailing possibilities. And lastly, just as blue- and white-­collar workers have constantly found ways to retain their humanity and continually struggle to integrate conception and execution in their work (if only to relieve boredom) so too will teachers and students find ways, in the cracks, so to speak, to do the same things. The real question is not whether such resistances exist—as I have shown throughout this volume they are never far from the surface—but whether they are contradictory themselves, whether they lead anywhere beyond the reproduction of the ideological hegemony of the most powerful classes in our society, whether they can be employed for political education and intervention. Our task is first to find them. We need somehow to give life to the resistances, the struggles. What I have done here is to point to the terrain within the school (the transformation of work, the deskilling and reskilling, the technical control, and so on) over which these struggles will be fought. The resistances may be informal, not fully organized or even conscious; yet this does not mean that they will have no impact. For as Gramsci and Johnson65 remind us, hegemony is always contested. Our own work should help in this contestation and point to places for active engagement. My analysis of the process through which technical/administrative knowledge reenters the school through dominant curricular forms highlights some of the strategies for action that I discussed in earlier chapters. As I noted, the expansion of particular logics of control of the labor process creates contradictory effects and provides a potential for successful political work. With the loss of control, one should expect increasing unionization of teachers. This provides an important context. While the history of unionization has in part been the history of economistic demands (and this is not always wrong, by the way), at the same time it is not naturally preordained that salaries and so on are the only things that can be placed on the agenda. Thus, this makes more significant my earlier suggestion that the growing “proletarianization” of state workers and the rapid decrease in their objective standard of living and job stability may, in fact, make it easier for the formation of coalitions between teachers and other workers in similar conditions. If Castells’s argument is correct—that ultimately the conditions will worsen—then cuts in public services, welfare, education, health, unemployment benefits, and so on will become increasingly extensive in the foreseeable future. This will have a tendency to place the interests of school employees in the maintenance of their programs and jobs on the same side as the large number of people who will have to fight to retain the programs, services, and rights they have won after years of struggle.

Curricular Form   111 This tendency is coupled with something else. The rapidity of the pace in which procedures are introduced to rationalize teachers’ work and to control as many aspects of education as possible is having an impact similar to what happened when Taylorism was introduced in industry. Its ultimate effect may not be totally successful control, though one should not dismiss its power and sophistication. Rather, in the long run, it may discredit teachers’ organization of their own work so that the activities necessary for serious education to go on, activities that teachers have developed out of their own experiences and work culture, will be labeled with the educational equivalent of “soldiering” when they are not expressly linked to the production of the knowledge and agents needed by an economy. Needless to say this would have a truly destructive effect on any system of education worth its name. Enabling teachers to see the implications of this and having both them and other blue-, pink-, and white-­collar workers recognize the similarities of their collective predicament is an important political step. If they do in fact occupy a contradictory class location, then a significant path towards political education can be traveled. This, of course, is something that progressive elements within teacher unions in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and England and elsewhere in Europe have recognized and on which they are acting now. Within the school itself, there are areas that need to be stressed as well, even if only briefly. The question of curriculum content that I have raised before is still a serious issue. I have maintained in this chapter that, while it is no simple process to read the ideological elements in or effects of content, the fact that it is a contested area for industry proves the importance of continued attempts both to maintain the democratic elements that currently exist within the content itself and to continue to fight the overt and covert intrusion of business and rightist interests into the selection of appropriate curricular knowledge. Yet my arguments here have also pointed out the necessity of acting on more than content. At the level of form, clearly the emphasis on individualized, rationalized material makes it quite difficult for collective learning experiences to go on. Altering that emphasis as much as is possible, focusing on joint activity—even if only on such simple things as reports, papers, inquiry, collectively produced drama, art, and so on—is not insignificant. This can and should be made an overt element in the content as well, where the demystification of the “great man” theory of history, science, etc. is so necessary. One can stress the contributions of groups of real working people acting together as an organizing principle here.66 Of course, much more could be said. Again, my claim is not that it will be easy to establish such progressive coalitions or to engage in either political education among state workers or curriculum reform. Given current economic conditions and given the right’s skillful integration of popular democratic and corporate claims and their incorporation of populist themes into the rhetoric of an increasing sphere of capitalist social relations, the implications are exactly the opposite. It is possible, not easy. However, it is on the terrain that I have identified in this chapter that a good deal of the struggle will be worked out. The terrain offers not just increasing incorporation, rationalization, and control, but opportunities as well.

112   Curricular Form

Notes   1. James Donald, “Green Paper: Noise of a Crisis,” Screen Education XXX (Spring 1979), 44.   2. Ibid., 36–37.   3. J. Ryerson and Son, Inc., “The Ryerson Plan: A Teacher Work–Learn Program” (Chicago: Ryerson and Son Inc., unpublished advertisement, no date). I wish to thank Linda McNeil for bringing this material to my attention.   4. Ibid.   5. Diane Downing, “Soft Choices: Teaching Materials for Teaching Free Enterprise” (Austin, Texas: University of Texas, Institute for Constructive Capitalism, 1979, mimeo).   6. This is not to deny the importance of analyzing official documents emanating from the state. James Donald’s essay on the Green Paper noted above provides an excellent example of the power of discourse analysis, for example, in unpacking what these documents mean and do.   7. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).   8. Dan Finn, Neil Grant, Richard Johnson, and the C.C.C.S. Education Group, “Social Democracy, Education and the Crisis,” Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1978, mimeo, p. 34.   9. James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973). 10. See, for example, Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Williams, Marxism and Literature, and Michael W. Apple, “Ideology and Form in Curriculum Evaluation,” in Qualitative Evaluation, ed. George Willis (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1978), pp. 495–521. 11. John Clarke, “Capital and Culture: The Post War Working Class Revisited,” in Working Class Culture, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979). See also the impressive discussions in Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and Michael Burawoy, “Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process: Braverman and Beyond,” Politics and Society VIII (Number 3/4, 1979). 12. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 17. 13. Ibid., pp. 19–21. 14. Ibid., p. 110. 15. See David Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); and Burawoy, “Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process.” 16. Stanley Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital,” The Insurgent Sociologist VIII (Fall, 1978), 126–146; and David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 17. Edwards, Contested Terrain. 18. Jane Barker and Hazel Downing, “Word Processing and the Transformation of Patriarchal Relations,” Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1979, unpublished paper. 19. Roger Dale, “The Politicization of School Deviance,” in Schools, Pupils and Deviance, ed. Len Barton and Roland Meighan (Driffield, England: Nafferton Books, 1979), pp. 95–112. 20. Todd Gitlin, “Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television Entertainment,” Social Problems XXVII (February 1979), 251–266. Philip Wexler’s forthcoming volume, Critical Social Psychology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, in press) on the commodification of intimate relations is important here as well. 21. This is not only an American phenomenon. The foreign subsidiaries of the companies who produce these materials are translating and marketing their products in the Third World and elsewhere as well. In many ways it is similar to the cultural imperialism of Walt Disney Productions. See, e.g., Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How To Read Donald Duck (New York: International General Editions, 1975). 22. Science, A Process Approach: Module One (Lexington: Ginn and Co., 1974), pp. 3–4. 23. Ibid., p. 7. 24. Ibid.

Curricular Form   113 25. See, for example, my analysis of science curricula in Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). 26. I do not mean to romanticize that past, however. Many teachers probably simply followed the textbook before. However, the level of specificity and the integration of curricular, pedagogical, and evaluative aspects of classroom life into one system is markedly different. The use of the system brings with it much more technical control of every aspect of teaching than previous text-­based curricula. Obviously, some teachers will not follow the system’s rules. Given the level of integration, though, it will undoubtedly be much more difficult to ignore it since many systems constitute the core or only program in that curricular area in the entire school or district. Thus, accountability to the next grade level or to administrators makes it harder to ignore. I shall return to this point later on. For an interesting theoretic discussion of the historical development of and reasons for what others have called the “alienation of the teacher from his or her products” in this deskilling process, see Henry Levin, “Education Production Theory and Teacher Inputs,” in The Analysis of Educational Productivity Volume II, ed. Charles Bidwell and Douglas Windham (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Press, 1980), pp. 203–231. 27. This may be similar to what happened in the early mills in New England, when standardized production processes drastically reduced the contact among workers. See Edwards, Contested Terrain, p. 114. A recent study by Andrew Gitlin, however, points out that in some settings interaction increases but it is always over the technical questions raised by the material. Teachers deal primarily with issues of organizational efficiency in the study due to the constraints of the curricular form itself. See Andrew Gitlin, “Understanding the Work of Teachers,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980. 28. Ibid., p. 181. 29. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum; and Noble, America By Design. One could also claim that schools operate to create use value not exchange value. Erik Olin Wright, personal communication. 30. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978). 31. Therefore, any outcomes of schooling must be analyzed as the “products” of cultural, political, and economic resistances as well as sets of structural determinations, as I argued in Chapter 4. See Michael W. Apple, “Analyzing Determinations: Understanding and Evaluating the Production of Social Outcomes in Schools,” Curriculum Inquiry X (Spring 1980), 55–76. 32. I do not want to ignore the question of the relationship between capitalism and bureaucracy. Weber and others were not wrong when they noted that there are needs for rationalization specific to bureaucratic forms themselves. However, neither the way bureaucracy has grown in corporate economies nor its effects have been neutral. This is treated in considerably more detail in Daniel C. Clawson, “Class Struggle and the Rise of Bureaucracy,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1978. See also, Wright, Class, Crisis and the State. 33. Barker and Downing, “Word Processing and the Transformation of Patriarchal Relations.” See also Noble, America By Design, for his account of standardization and its relationship to capital accumulation. 34. Joel Spring, The Sorting Machine (New York: David McKay, 1976). 35. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum. 36. See, e.g., O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State. 37. Among the reasons for the fact that the state has slowly but surely backed away from such production and distribution is the controversy surrounding “Man: A Course of Study” and, no doubt, the intense lobbying efforts on the part of publishing firms. Corporations will let the government socialize the costs of development, but obviously would prefer to package and distribute the curricula for themselves. See Michael W. Apple, “Politics and National Curriculum Policy,” Curriculum Inquiry VII (Number 7, 1977), 351–361. 38. Donald, “Green Paper: Noise of a Crisis,” 44. 39. This is not meant to imply that the state always directly serves the needs of industrial capital. As I argued in Chapter 4, it, in fact, does have a significant degree of relative autonomy and

114   Curricular Form is the site of class conflict as well. See Donald, “Green Paper: Noise of a Crisis,” Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, and Roger Dale, “Education and the Capitalist State: Contributions and Contradictions,” in Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology and the State, ed. Michael W. Apple (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 40. As I noted earlier, however, we should remember that accumulation and legitimation may be in conflict with each other at times. See Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, for a discussion of these possible contradictions and for an argument about the importance of understanding the way the state and bureaucracies mediate and act back on “economic determinations.” Though I have not specifically noted it here, the transformation of discourse in schools is similar to, and needs to be analyzed in the light of, the process described by Habermas in his discussion of the constitutive interests of purposive/rational action. I have dealt with this at length elsewhere in Apple, Ideology and Curriculum. 41. Clarke, “Capital and Culture: The Post War Working Class Revisited,” p. 241. 42. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961); and C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 43. Richard Johnson, “Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture,” in Working Class Culture, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 232. 44. Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 187. 45. Bernstein’s work on class and educational codes is interesting here. As he notes, “The pacing of educational knowledge is class based.” Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control Volume 3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 113. 46. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1973), p. 95. 47. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State, p. 79. 48. Ibid., p. 59. 49. Ibid., p. 81. See also Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. 50. Edward, Contested Terrain, p. 151. Of course, this does not mean that important resistances and countervailing practices do or will not occur. As I demonstrated in Chapter 3, exactly the opposite is often the case. However, they usually occur on the terrain established in large part by capital. 51. Richard Johnson, “Histories of Culture/Theories of Ideology: Notes on an Impasse,” in Ideology and Cultural Production, eds. Michele Barrett et al. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 70. 52. Paul Willis, Profane Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). 53. Geoff Whitty has been particularly helpful in enabling me to see this point. 54. Colin Sumner, Reading Ideologies (New York: Academic Press, 1979), p. 134. 55. Ibid., p. 149. 56. John Hill, “Ideology, Economy and the British Cinema,” in Ideology and Cultural Production, ed. Michele Barrett et al. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 114. 57. Ibid., p. 115. 58. Ibid., p. 122. 59. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 89. 60. These “internalistic” readings can be taken too far, of course. For to focus our attention only on the contradictions and ideologies within and produced by such material, or on the contradictions produced by the relationship between form and content, has a serious danger. We may forget how very important are the forces that “determine” the actual production of curricular material in this way, a point I made earlier in my discussion of the way the school has become a rather lucrative market. See, for example, the essays on the political economy of cultural production by Golding and Murdock and others in Barrett et al., eds., Ideology and Cultural Production. 61. Johnson, “Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture.” 62. Edwards, Contested Terrain, p. 154. 63. Donald, “Green Paper: Noise of a Crisis.”

Curricular Form   115 64. Herbert Gintis, “Communication and Politics: Marxism and the ‘Problem’ of Liberal Democracy,” Socialist Review X (March–June 1980), 189–232. 65. Johnson, “Histories of Culture/Theories of Ideology.” 66. See, for example, some of the suggested material in Miriam Wolf-­Wasserman and Kate Hutchinson, Teaching Human Dignity (Minneapolis: Education Exploration Center, 1978). Also helpful here is Ira Shor, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (Boston: South End Press, 1980).

6 Controlling the Work of Teachers

Proletarianization: Class and Gender An examination of changes in class composition over the past two decades points out something quite dramatically. The process of proletarianization has had a large and consistent effect. There has been a systematic tendency for those positions with relatively little control over their labor process to expand during this time period. At the same time, there was a decline in positions with high levels of autonomy.1 This should not surprise us. In fact, it would be unusual if this did not occur, especially now. In a time of general stagnation and of crises in accumulation and legitimation, we should expect that there will also be attempts to further rationalize managerial structures and increase the pressure to proletarianize the labor process. This pressure is not inconsequential to educators, both in regard to the kinds of positions students will find available (or not available) after completing (or not completing) schooling, and also in regard to the very conditions of working within education itself. The labor of what might be called ‘semi-­autonomous employees’ will certainly feel the impact of this. Given the fiscal crisis of the state, this impact will be felt more directly among state employees such as teachers as well. One should expect to see a rapid growth of plans and pressures for the rationalization of administration and labor within the state itself.2 This is one of the times when one’s expectations will not be disappointed. In earlier work, I argued that teachers have been involved in a long but now steadily increasing restructuring of their jobs. I claimed that they were more and more faced with the prospect of being deskilled because of the encroachment of technical control procedures into the curriculum in schools. The integration together of management systems, reductive behaviorally based curricula, pre-­specified teaching ‘competencies’ and procedures and student responses, and pre and post testing, was leading to a loss of control and a separation of conception from execution. In sum, the labor process of teaching was becoming susceptible to processes similar to those that led to the proletarianization of many other blue-, pink-, and white-­collar jobs. I suggested that this restructuring of teaching had important implications given the contradictory class location of teachers.3 When I say that teachers have a contradictory class location, I am not implying that they are by definition within the middle classes, or that they are in an ambiguous position somehow ‘between’ classes. Instead, along with Wright, I am saying that it is wise to think of them as located simultaneously in two classes. They thus share the interests

Controlling the Work of Teachers   117 of both the petty bourgeoisie and the working class.4 Hence, when there is a fiscal crisis in which many teachers are faced with worsening working conditions, layoffs, and even months without being paid—as has been the case in a number of urban areas in the United States—and when their labor is restructured so that they lose control, it is possible that these contradictory interests will move closer to those of other workers and people of color who have historically been faced with the use of similar procedures by capital and the state.5 Yet, teachers are not only classed actors. They are gendered actors as well—something that is too often neglected by investigators. This is a significant omission. A striking conclusion is evident from the analyses of proletarianization. In every occupational category, women are more apt to be proletarianized than men. This could be because of sexist practices of recruitment and promotion, the general tendency to care less about the conditions under which women labor, the way capital has historically colonized patriarchal relations, the historical relation between teaching and domesticity, and so on. Whatever the reason, it is clear that a given position may be more or less proletarianized depending on its relationship to the sexual division of labor.6 In the United States, it is estimated that over 90 percent of women’s (paid) work falls into four basic categories: (1) employment in ‘peripheral’ manufacturing industries and retail trades, and considerably now in the expanding but low-­paid service sector of the economy; (2) clerical work; (3) health and education; and (4) domestic service. Most women in, say, the United States and the United Kingdom are concentrated in either the lowest-­paid positions in these areas or at the bottom of the middle-­ pay grades when there has been some mobility.7 One commentator puts it both bluntly and honestly: ‘The evidence of discrimination against women in the labour market is considerable and reading it is a wearing experience.’8 This pattern is, of course, largely reproduced within education. Even given the years of struggle by progressive women and men, the figures—most of which will be quite familiar to many of you—are depressing. While the overwhelming majority of school teachers are women (a figure that becomes even higher in the primary and elementary schools), many more men are heads or principals of primary and elementary schools, despite the proportion of women teachers.9 As the vertical segregation of the workforce increased, this proportion actually increased in inequality. In the United States in 1928, women accounted for 55 percent of the elementary school principalships. Today, with nearly 90 percent of the teaching force in elementary schools being women, they account for only 20 percent of principals.10 This pattern has strong historical roots— roots that cannot be separated from the larger structures of class and patriarchy outside the school. In this chapter, I shall want to claim that unless we see the connections between these two dynamics—class and gender—we cannot understand the history of and current attempts at rationalizing education or the roots and effects of proletarianization on teaching itself. Not all teaching can be unpacked by examining it as a labor process or as a class phenomenon, though as I have tried to demonstrate in some of my previous work much of it is made clearer when we integrate it into theories of and changes in class position and the labor process. Neither can all of teaching be understood as totally related to patriarchy, though why it is structured the way it is is due in very large part to the history of male dominance and gender struggles,11 a history I

118   Controlling the Work of Teachers shall discuss in considerably more detail in the next chapter. The two dynamics of class and gender (with race, of course) are not reducible to each other, but intertwine, work off, and co-­determine the terrain on which each operates. It is at the intersection of these two dynamics that one can begin to unravel some of the reasons why procedures for rationalizing the work of teachers have evolved. As we shall see, the ultimate effects of these procedures, with the loss of control that accompanies them, can bear in important ways on how we think about the ‘reform’ of teaching and curriculum and the state’s role in it.

Academic Knowledge and Curricular Control So far I have made a number of general claims about the relationship between proletarianization and patriarchy in the constitution of teaching. I want to go on to suggest ways we can begin to see this relationship in operation. Some sense of the state’s role in sponsoring changes in curricular and teaching practice in the recent past is essential here. The fact that schools have tended to be largely organized around male leadership and female teachers is simply that—a social fact—unless one realizes that this means that educational authority relations have been formally patriarchal. As in the home and the office, male dominance is there; but teachers—like wives, mothers, clerical workers, and other women engaged in paid and unpaid labor—have carved out spheres of power and control in their long struggle to gain some autonomy. This autonomy only becomes a problem for capital and the state when what education is for needs revision. To take one example outside of education: in offices clerical work is in the process of being radically transformed with the introduction of word-­processing technologies, video display terminals, and so on. Traditional forms of control—ones usually based on the dominance of the male boss—are being altered. Technical control, where one’s work is deskilled and intensified by the ‘impersonal’ machinery in the office, has made significant inroads. While certainly not eliminating patriarchal domination, it has in fact provided a major shift in the terrain on which it operates. Capital has found more efficient modes of control than overt patriarchal authority.12 Similar changes have occurred in schools. In a time when the needs of industry for technical knowledge and technically trained personnel intersect with the growth in power of the new petty bourgeoisie (those people in technical and middle management positions) and the reassertion of academic dominance in the curriculum, pressures for curricular reform can become quite intense. Patience over traditional forms of control will lessen. Patriarchal relations of power, therefore, organized around the male principal’s relations to a largely female teaching staff, will not necessarily be progressive for capital or the state. While they once served certain educational and ideological ends, they are less efficient than what has been required recently. Gender relations must be partly subverted to create a more efficient institution. Techniques of control drawn from industry will tend to replace older styles which depended more on a sexual division of power and labor within the school itself. Perhaps an example will document the long and continuing history of these altered relationships. In the United States, for instance, during the late 1950s and the 1960s,

Controlling the Work of Teachers   119 there was rather strong pressure from academics, capital, and the state to reinstitute academic disciplinary knowledge as the most ‘legitimate’ content for schools. In the areas of mathematics and science especially, it was feared that ‘real’ knowledge was not being taught. A good deal of effort was given to producing curricular programs that were systematic, based on rigorous academic foundations, and, in the elementary school material in particular, were teacher-­proof. Everything a teacher was to deal with was provided and prespecified. The cost of the development of such programs was socialized by the state (i.e., subsidized by tax dollars). The chance of their being adopted by local school districts was heightened by the National Defense Education Act, which reimbursed school districts for a large portion of the purchase cost. That is, if a school system purchased new material of this type and the technology which supported it, the relative cost was minimal. The bulk of the expense was repaid by the state. Hence, it would have seemed irrational not to buy the material—irrational in two ways: (1) the chance of getting new curricula at low cost is clearly a rational management decision within industrial logic, and (2) given its imprimatur of science and efficiency, the material itself seemed rational. All of this is no doubt familiar to anyone who lived through the early years of this movement, and who sees the later, somewhat less powerful, effects it had in, say, England and elsewhere. Yet this is not only the history of increasing state sponsorship of and state intervention in teaching and curriculum development and adoption. It is the history of the state, in concert with capital and a largely male academic body of consultants and developers, intervening at the level of practice into the work of a largely female workforce. That is, ideologies of gender, of sex-­appropriate knowledge, need to be seen as having possibly played a significant part here. The loss of control and rationalization of one’s work forms part of a state/class/gender ‘couplet’ that works its way out in the following ways. Mathematics and science teaching are seen as abysmal. ‘We’ need rapid change in our economic responsiveness and in ‘our’ emerging ideological and economic struggle with the Soviet Union.13 Teachers (who just happen to be almost all women at the elementary level) aren’t sophisticated enough. Former ways of curricular and teaching control are neither powerful nor efficient enough for this situation. Provide both teacher-­proof materials and financial incentives to make certain that these sets of curricula actually reach the classroom. One must integrate an analysis of the state, changes in the labor process of state employees, and the politics of patriarchy to comprehend the dynamics of this history of curriculum. It is not a random fact that one of the most massive attempts at rationalizing curricula and teaching had as its target a group of teachers who were largely women. I believe that one cannot separate out the fact of a sexual division of labor and the vision of who has what kinds of competence from the state’s attempts to revamp and make more ‘productive’ its educational apparatus. In so doing, by seeing these structurally generated relationships, we can begin to open up a door to understanding part of the reasons behind what happened to these curriculum materials when they were in fact introduced. As numerous studies have shown, when the material was introduced into many schools, it was not unusual for the ‘new’ math and ‘new’ science to be taught in much the same manner as the old math and old science. It was altered so that it fitted into both the existing regularities of the institution and the prior practices that had proven

120   Controlling the Work of Teachers successful in teaching.14 It is probably wise to see this as not only the result of a slow-­ to-change bureaucracy or a group of consistently conservative administrators and teachers. Rather, I think it may be just as helpful to think of this more structurally in labor process and gender terms. The supposed immobility of the institution, its lack of significant change in the face of the initial onslaught of such material, is at least partly tied to the resistances of a female workforce against external incursions into the practices they had evolved over years of labor. It is in fact more than a little similar to the history of ways in which other women employees in the state and industry have reacted to past attempts at altering traditional modes of control of their own labor.15

A Note on the State The points I have just made about the resistances of the people who actually work in the institutions, about women teachers confronted by external control, may seem straightforward. However, these basic arguments have very important implications not only about how we think about the history of curriculum reform and control, but more importantly about how many educators and political theorists have pictured the larger issue of the state’s role in supporting capital. In the historical example I gave, state intervention on the side of capital and for ‘defense’ is in opposition to other positions within the state itself. The day-­to-day interests of one occupational position (teachers) contradict the larger interests of the state in efficient production.16 Because of instances such as this, it is probably inappropriate to see the state as a homogeneous entity, standing above day-­to-day conflicts. Since schools are state apparatuses, we should expect them to be under intense pressure to act in certain ways, especially in times of both fiscal and ideological crises. Even so, this does not mean that people employed in them are passive followers of policies laid down from above. As Roger Dale has noted: Teachers are not merely ‘state functionaries’ but do have some degree of autonomy, and [this] autonomy will not necessarily be used to further the proclaimed ends of the state apparatus. Rather than those who work there fitting themselves to the requirements of the institutions, there are a number of very important ways in which the institution has to take account of the interests of the employees and fit itself to them. It is here, for instance, that we may begin to look for the sources of the alleged inertia of educational systems and schools, that is to say what appears as inertia is not some immutable characteristic of bureaucracies but is due to various groups within them having more immediate interests than the pursuit of the organization’s goals.17 Thus, the ‘mere’ fact that the state wishes to find ‘more efficient’ ways to organize teaching does not guarantee that this will be acted upon by teachers who have a long history of work practices and self-­organization once the doors to their rooms are closed. As we shall see in a moment, however, the fact that it is primarily women employees who have faced these forms of rationalization has meant that the actual outcomes of these attempts to retain control of one’s pedagogic work can lead to rather contradictory ideological results.

Controlling the Work of Teachers   121

Legitimating Intervention While these initial attempts at rationalizing teaching and curricula did not always produce the results that were anticipated by their academic, industrial, and governmental proponents, they did other things that were, and are, of considerable import. The situation is actually quite similar to the effects of the use of Tayloristic management strategies in industry. As a management technology for deskilling workers and separating conception from execution, Taylorism was less than fully successful. It often generated slowdowns and strikes, exacerbated tensions, and created new forms of overt and covert resistance. Yet, its ultimate effect was to legitimate a particular ideology of management and control both to the public and to employers and workers.18 Even though it did not succeed as a set of techniques, it ushered in and finally brought acceptance of a larger body of ideological practices to deskill pink-, white-, and blue-­ collar workers and to rationalize and intensify their labor. This too was one of the lasting consequences of these earlier curriculum ‘reform’ movements. While they also did not completely transform the practice of teaching, while patriarchal relations of authority which paradoxically ‘gave’ teachers some measure of freedom were not totally replaced by more efficient forms of organizing and controlling their day-­to-day activity, they legitimated both new forms of control and greater state intervention using industrial and technical models and brought about a new generation of more sophisticated attempts at overcoming teacher ‘resistance.’ Thus, this new generation of techniques that are being instituted in so many states in the United States and elsewhere currently—from systematic integration of testing, behavioral goals and curriculum, competency-­based instruction and prepackaged curricula, to management by objectives, and so forth—has not sprung out of nowhere, but, like the history of Taylorism, has grown out of the failures, partial successes, and resistances that accompanied the earlier approaches to control. As I have claimed, this is not only the history of the control of state employees to bring about efficient teaching, but a rearticulation of the dynamics of patriarchy and class in one site, the school.

Intensification and Teaching In the first half of this chapter, we paid particular attention to the historical dynamics operating in the schools. I would like now to focus on more current outgrowths of this earlier history of rationalization and control. The earlier attempts by state bureaucrats, industry, and others to gain greater control of day-­to-day classroom operation and its ‘output’ did not die. They have had more than a decade to grow, experiment, and become more sophisticated. While gender will be less visible in the current strategies (in much the same way that the growth of management strategies in industry slowly covered the real basis of power in factories and offices), as we shall see it will be present in important ways once we go beneath the surface to look at changes in the labor process of teaching, how some teachers respond to current strategies, and how they interpret their own work. Since in previous work I have focused on a number of elements through which curricula and teaching are controlled—on the aspects of deskilling and reskilling of labor, and on the separation of conception from execution in teachers’ work—here I shall

122   Controlling the Work of Teachers want to concentrate more on something which accompanies these historically evolving processes: what I shall call intensification. First, let me discuss this process rather generally. Intensification ‘represents one of the most tangible ways in which the work privileges of educational workers are eroded.’ It has many symptoms, from the trivial to the more complex—ranging from being allowed no time at all even to go to the bathroom, have a cup of coffee or relax, to having a total absence of time to keep up with one’s field. We can see intensification most visibly in mental labor in the chronic sense of work overload that has escalated over time.19 This has had a number of notable effects outside of education. In the newspaper industry, for example, because of financial pressures and the increased need for efficiency in operation, reporters have had their story quotas raised substantially. The possibility of doing non-­routine investigative reporting, hence, is lessened considerably. This has had the effects of increasing their dependence ‘on prescheduled, preformulated events’ in which they rely more and more on bureaucratic rules and surface accounts of news provided by official spokespersons.20 Intensification also acts to destroy the sociability of non-­manual workers. Leisure and self-­direction tend to be lost. Community tends to be redefined around the needs of the labor process. And, since both time and interaction are at a premium, the risk of isolation grows.21 Intensification by itself ‘does not necessarily reduce the range of skills applied or possessed by educated workers.’ It may, in fact, cause them to ‘cut corners’ by eliminating what seems to be inconsequential to the task at hand. This has occurred with doctors, for instance; many examinations now concentrate only on what seems critical. The chronic work overload has also caused some non-­manual workers to learn or relearn skills. The financial crisis has led to shortages of personnel in a number of areas. Thus, a more diverse array of jobs must be done that used to be covered by other people— people who simply do not exist within the institution any more.22 While this leads to a broader range of skills having to be learned or relearned, it can lead to something mentioned earlier—the loss of time to keep up with one’s field. That is, what might be called ‘skill diversification’ has a contradiction built into it. It is also part of a dynamic of intellectual deskilling23 in which mental workers are cut off from their own fields and again must rely even more heavily on ideas and processes provided by ‘experts.’ While these effects are important, one of the most significant impacts of intensification may be in reducing the quality, not the quantity, of service provided to people. While, traditionally, ‘human service professionals’ have equated doing good work with the interests of their clients or students, intensification tends to contradict the traditional interest in work well done, in both a quality product and process.24 As I shall document, a number of these aspects of intensification are increasingly found in teaching, especially in those schools which are dominated by behaviorally prespecified curricula, repeated testing, and strict and reductive accountability systems. (The fact that these kinds of curricula, tests, and systems are now more and more being mandated should make us even more cautious.) To make this clear, I want to draw on some data from recent research on the effects of these procedures on the structure of teachers’ work.

Controlling the Work of Teachers   123 I have argued here and elsewhere that there has been a rapid growth in curricular ‘systems’ in the United States—one that is now spreading to other countries.25 These curricula have goals, strategies, tests, textbooks, worksheets, appropriate student response, etc., integrated together. In schools where this is taken seriously,26 what impact has this been having? We have evidence from a number of ethnographic studies of the labor process of teaching to be able to begin to point to what is going on. For example, in one school where the curriculum was heavily based on a sequential list of behaviorally defined competencies and objectives, multiple worksheets on skills which the students were to complete, with pre-­tests to measure ‘readiness’ and ‘skill level’ and post-­tests to measure ‘achievement’ that were given often and regularly, the intensification of teacher work is quite visible. In this school, such curricular practice required that teachers spend a large portion of their time evaluating student ‘mastery’ of each of the various objectives and recording the results of these multiple evaluations for later discussions with parents or decisions on whether or not the student could ‘go on’ to another set of skill-­based worksheets. The recording and evaluation made it imperative that a significant amount of time be spent on administrative arrangements for giving tests, and then grading them, organizing lessons (which were quite often standardized or pre-­packaged), and so on. One also found teachers busy with these tasks before and after school and, very often, during their lunch hour. Teachers began to come in at 7:15 in the morning and leave at 4:30 in the afternoon. Two hours’ more work at home each night was not unusual, as well.27 Just as I noted in my general discussion of the effects of intensification, here too getting done became the norm. There is so much to do that simply accomplishing what is specified requires nearly all of one’s efforts. ‘The challenge of the work day (or week) was to accomplish the required number of objectives.’ As one teacher put it, ‘I just want to get this done. I don’t have time to be creative or imaginative.’28 We should not blame the teacher here. In mathematics, for example, teachers typically had to spend nearly half of the allotted time correcting and recording the worksheets the students completed each day.29 The situation seemed to continually push the workload of these teachers up. Thus, even though they tended to complain at times about the long hours, the intensification, the time spent on technical tasks such as grading and record-­ keeping, the amount of time spent doing these things grew inexorably.30 Few of the teachers were passive in the face of this, and I shall return to this point shortly. Even though the elements of curricular control were effective in structuring major aspects of their practice, teachers often responded in a variety of ways. They subtly changed the pre-­specified objectives because they couldn’t see their relevance. They tried to resist the intensification as well: first by trying to find some space during the day for doing slower-­paced activities; and second by actually calling a halt temporarily to the frequent pre- and post-­tests, worksheets and the like and merely having ‘relaxed discussions with students on topics of their own choosing.’31 This, of course, is quite contradictory. While these examples document the active role of teachers in attempting to win back some time, to resist the loss of control of their own work, and to slow down the pace at which students and they were to proceed, the way this is done is not necessarily very powerful. In these instances, time was fought for simply to relax, if only for a few minutes. The process of control, the

124   Controlling the Work of Teachers increasing technicization and intensification of the teaching act, the proletarianization of their work—all of this was an absent presence. It was misrecognized as a symbol of their increased professionalism.

Profession and Gender We cannot understand why teachers interpreted what was happening to them as the professionalization of their jobs unless we see how the ideology of professionalism works as part of both a class and gender dynamic in education. For example, while reliance on ‘experts’ to create curricular and teaching goals and procedures grew in this kind of situation, a wider range of technical skills had to be mastered by these teachers. Becoming adept at grading all those tests and worksheets quickly, deciding on which specific skill group to put a student in, learning how to ‘efficiently manage’ the many different groups based on the tests, and more, all became important skills. As responsibility for designing one’s own curricula and one’s own teaching decreased, responsibility over technical and management concerns came to the fore. Professionalism and increased responsibility tend to go hand in hand here. The situation is more than a little paradoxical. There is so much responsibility placed on teachers for technical decisions that they actually work harder. They feel that since they constantly make decisions based on the outcomes of these multiple pre- and post-­tests, the longer hours are evidence of their enlarged professional status. Perhaps a quote will be helpful here. One reason the work is harder is we have a lot of responsibility in decision-­making. There’s no reason not to work hard, because you want to be darn sure that those decisions you made are something that might be helpful. . . . So you work hard to be successful at these decisions so you look like a good decision maker.32 It is here that the concept of professionalism seemed to have one of its major impacts. Since the teachers thought of themselves as being more professional to the extent that they employed technical criteria and tests, they also basically accepted the longer hours and the intensification of their work that accompanied the program. To do a ‘good job,’ you needed to be as ‘rational’ as possible.33 We should not scoff at these perceptions on the part of the teachers. First, the very notion of professionalization has been important not only to teachers in general but to women in particular. It has provided a contradictory yet powerful barrier against interference by the state; and just as critically, in the struggle over male dominance, it has been part of a complex attempt to win equal treatment, pay, and control over the day-­ to-day work of a largely female labor force.34 Second, while we need to remember that professionalism as a social goal grew at the same time and was justified by the ‘project and practice of the market professions during the liberal phase of capitalism,’35 the strategy of professionalism has historically been used to set up ‘effective defenses against proletarianization.’36 Given what I said earlier about the strong relationship between the sexual division of labor and proletarianization, it would be not only ahistorical but perhaps even a bit sexist as well wholly to blame teachers for employing a professional strategy.

Controlling the Work of Teachers   125 Hence, the emphasis on increasing professionalism by learning new management skills and so on today and its partial acceptance by elementary school teachers can best be understood not only as an attempt by state bureaucrats to deskill and reskill teachers, but as part of a much larger historical dynamic in which gender politics have played a significant role. Yet the acceptance of certain aspects of intensification is not only due to the history of how professionalism has worked in class and gender struggles. It is heightened by a number of internal factors as well. For example, in the school to which I referred earlier, while a number of teachers believed that the rigorous specification of objectives and teaching procedures actually helped free them to become more creative, it was clear that subtle pressures existed to meet the priorities established by the specified objectives. Even though in some subject areas they had a choice of how they were to meet the objectives, the objectives themselves usually remained unchallenged. The perceived interests of parents and their establishment of routines helped assure this. Here is one teacher’s assessment of how this occurs. Occasionally you’re looking at the end of the book at what the unit is going to be, these are the goals that you have to obtain, that the children are going to be tested on. That may affect your teaching in some way in that you may by-­pass other learning experiences simply to obtain the goal. These goals are going home to parents. It’s a terrible thing to do but parents like to see 90’s and 100’s rather than 60’s on skills.37 In discussing the use of the skills program, another teacher points out the other element besides parents that was mentioned: ‘It’s got a manual and you follow the manual and the kids know the directions and it gets to be routine.’38 Coupled with perceived parental pressure and the sheer power of routine is something else: the employment practices surrounding teaching. In many schools, one of the main criteria for the hiring of teachers is their agreement with the overall curricular, pedagogic, and evaluative framework which organizes the day-­to-day practice. Such was the case in this study. Beyond this, however, even though some investigators have found that people who tend to react negatively to these pre-­packaged, standardized, and systematized curricular forms often leave teaching,39 given the depressed market for new teachers in many areas that have severe fiscal problems and the conscious decision by some school districts to hire fewer teachers and increase class size, fewer jobs are available right now. The option of leaving or even protesting seems romantic, though current teacher shortages may change this.

Gendered Resistance At this point in my argument it would be wise to return to a claim I made earlier. Teachers have not stood by and accepted all this. In fact, our perception that they have been and are passive in the face of these pressures may reflect our own tacit beliefs in the relative passivity of women workers. This would be an unfortunate characterization. Historically, for example, as I shall demonstrate in the following chapter, in England and the United States the picture of women teachers as non-­militant and

126   Controlling the Work of Teachers middle-­class in orientation is not wholly accurate. There have been periods of exceptional militancy and clear political commitment.40 However, militancy and political commitment are but one set of ways in which control is contested. It is also fought for on the job itself in subtle and even ‘unconscious’ (one might say ‘cultural’) ways—ways which will be contradictory, as we shall now see. Once again, gender will become of prime importance. In my own interviews with teachers it has become clear that many of them feel rather uncomfortable with their role as ‘managers.’ Many others are less than happy with the emphasis on programs which they often feel ‘lock us into a rigid system.’ Here the resistance to rationalization and the loss of historically important forms of self-­ control of one’s labor has very contradictory outcomes, partly as a result of sexual divisions in society. Thus, a teacher using a curricular program in reading and language arts that is very highly structured and test-­based states: While it’s really important for the children to learn these skills, right now it’s more important for them to learn to feel good about themselves. That’s my role, getting them to feel good. That’s more important than tests right now. Another primary grade teacher, confronted by a rationalized curriculum program where students move from classroom to classroom for ‘skill groups,’ put it this way: Kids are too young to travel between classrooms all the time. They need someone there that they can always go to, who’s close to them. Anyway, subjects are less important than their feelings. In these quotes, discomfort with the administrative design is certainly evident. There is a clear sense that something is being lost. Yet the discomfort with the process is coded around the traditional distinctions that organize the sexual division of labor both within the family and in the larger society. The woman’s sphere is that of providing emotional security, caring for feelings, and so on. Do not misconstrue my points here. Teachers should care for the feelings and emotional security of their students. However, while these teachers rightly fight on a cultural level against what they perceive to be the ill-­effects of their loss of control and both the division and the intensification of their labor, they do so at the expense of reinstituting categories that partly reproduce other divisions that have historically grown out of patriarchal relations.41 This raises a significant point: much of the recent literature on the role of the school in the reproduction of class, sex, and race domination has directed our attention to the existence of resistances. This realization was not inconsequential and was certainly needed to enable us to go further than the overly deterministic models of explanation that had been employed to unpack what schools do. However, at the same time, this literature has run the risk of romanticizing such resistances. The fact that they exist does not guarantee that they will necessarily be progressive at each and every moment. Only by uncovering the contradictions within and between the dynamics of the labor process and gender can we begin to see what effects such resistances may actually have.42

Controlling the Work of Teachers   127

Labor, Gender, and Teaching I have paid particular attention here to the effects of the restructuring of teachers’ work in the school. I have claimed that we simply cannot understand what is happening to teaching and curriculum without placing it in a framework which integrates class (and its accompanying process of proletarianization) and gender together. The impact of deskilling and intensification occurs on a terrain and in an institution that is populated primarily by women teachers and male administrators—a fact that needs to be recognized as being historically articulated with both the social and sexual divisions of labor, knowledge, and power in our society. Yet, since elementary school teachers are primarily women, we must also look beyond the school to get a fuller comprehension of the impact of these changes and the responses of teachers to them. We need to remember something in this regard: women teachers often work in two sites—the school and then the home. Given the modification of patriarchal relations and the intensification of labor in teaching, what impact might this have outside the school? If so much time is spent on technical tasks at school and at home, is it possible that less time may be available for domestic labor in the home? Other people in the family may have to take up the slack, thereby partly challenging the sexual division of household labor. On the other hand, the intensification of teachers’ work, and the work overload that may result from it, may have exactly the opposite effect. It may increase the exploitation of unpaid work in the home by merely adding more to do without initially altering conditions in the family. In either case, such conditions will lead to changes, tensions, and conflicts outside of the sphere where women engage in paid work.43 It is worth thinking very carefully about the effects that working in one site will have on the other. The fact that this dual exploitation exists is quite consequential in another way. It opens up possible new avenues for political intervention by socialist feminists, I believe. By showing the relationship between the home and the job and the intensification growing in both, this may provide for a way of demonstrating the ties between both of these spheres and between class and gender. Thinking about such issues has actually provided the organizing framework for my analysis. The key to my investigation in this chapter has been reflecting about changes in how work is organized over time and, just as significantly, who is doing the work. A clearer sense of both of these—how and who—can enable us to see similarities and differences between the world of work in our factories and offices and that of semi-­ autonomous state employees such as teachers. What does this mean? Historically the major struggles labor engaged in at the beginning of the use of systematic management concerned resistance to speed-­ups.44 That is, the intensification of production, the pressure to produce more work in a given period, led to all kinds of interesting responses. Craft workers, for example, often simply refused to do more. Pressure was put on co-­workers who went too fast (or too slow). Breaks were extended. Tools and machines suddenly developed ‘problems.’ Teachers—given their contradictory class location, their relationship to the history of patriarchal control and the sexual division of labor, and the actual conditions of their work—will find it difficult to respond in the same way. They are usually isolated during their work, and perhaps more so now given the intensification of their labor.

128   Controlling the Work of Teachers Further, machinery and tools in the usual sense of these terms are not visible.45 And just as importantly, the perception of oneself as professional means that the pressures of intensification and the loss of control will be coded and dealt with in ways that are specific to that workplace and its own history. The ultimate effects will be very contradictory. In essence, therefore, I am arguing that—while similar labor processes may be working through institutions within industry and the state which have a major impact on women’s paid work—these processes will be responded to differently by different classes and class segments. The ideology of professional discretion will lead to a partial acceptance of, say, intensification by teachers on one level, and will generate a different kind of resistance—one specific to the actual work circumstances in which they have historically found themselves. The fact that these changes in the labor process of teaching occur on a terrain that has been a site of patriarchal relations plays a major part here. My arguments here are not to be construed as some form of ‘deficit theory.’ Women have won and will continue to win important victories, as I will demonstrate in the following chapter. Their action on a cultural level, though not overtly politicized, will not always lead to the results I have shown here. Rather, my points concern the inherently contradictory nature of teachers’ responses. These responses are victories and losses at one and the same time. The important question is how the elements of good sense embodied in these teachers’ lived culture can be reorganized in specifically feminist ways—ways that maintain the utter importance of caring and human relationships without at the same time reproducing other elements on that patriarchal terrain. I do not want to suggest that once you have realized the place of teaching in the sexual division of labor, you have thoroughly understood deskilling and reskilling, intensification and loss of control, or the countervailing pressures of professionalism and proletarianization in teachers’ work. Obviously, this is a very complex issue in which the internal histories of bureaucracies, the larger role of the state in a time of economic and ideological crisis,46 and the local political economy and power relations of each school play a part. What I do want to argue quite strongly, however, is the utter import of gendered labor as a constitutive aspect of the way management and the state have approached teaching and curricular control. Gendered labor is the absent presence behind all of our work. How it became such an absent presence is the topic of the next chapter.

Notes   1. Erik Olin Wright and Joachim Singelmann, ‘The Proletarianization of Work in American Capitalism,’ University of Wisconsin-­Madison Institute for Research on Poverty, Discussion Paper No. 647–681, 1981, p. 38.   2. Ibid., p. 43. See also Michael W. Apple, ‘State, Bureaucracy and Curriculum Control,’ Curriculum Inquiry 11 (Winter 1981), 379–88. For a discussion that rejects part of the argument about proletarianization, see Michael Kelly, White Collar Proletariat (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).   3. Deskilling, technical control and proletarianization are both technical and political concepts. They signify a complex historical process in which the control of labor has altered—one in which the skills employees have developed over many years on the job are broken down into atomistic units, redefined, and then appropriated by management to enhance both efficiency

Controlling the Work of Teachers   129 and control of the labor process. In the process, workers’ control over timing, over defining appropriate ways to do a task, and over criteria that establish acceptable performance are all slowly taken on as the prerogatives of management personnel who are usually divorced from the actual place in which the work is carried out. Deskilling, then, often leads to the atrophy of valuable skills that workers possessed, since there is no longer any ‘need’ for them in the redefined labor process. The loss of control or proletarianization of a job is hence part of a larger dynamic in the separation of conception from execution and the continuing attempts by management in the state and industry to rationalize as many aspects of one’s labor as possible. I have discussed this in considerably more detail in Michael W. Apple, Education and Power (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). See also Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979), and Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).   4. Erik Olin Wright, ‘Class and Occupation,’ Theory and Society 9 (No. 2, 1980), 182–183.   5. Apple, Education and Power.   6. Wright, ‘Class and Occupation,’ 188. Clearly race plays an important part here too. See Michael Reich, Racial Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1979).   7. Janet Holland, ‘Women’s Occupational Choice: The Impact of Sexual Divisions in Society,’ Stockholm Institute of Education, Department of Educational Research, Reports on Education and Psychology, 1980, p. 7.   8. Ibid., p. 27.   9. Ibid., p. 45. 10. Gail Kelly and Ann Nihlen, ‘Schooling and the Reproduction of Patriarchy,’ in Michael W. Apple (ed.), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology and the State (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp.  167–168. One cannot fully understand the history of the relationship between women and teaching without tracing out the complex connections among the family, domesticity, child care, and the policies of and employment within the state. See especially, Miriam David, The State, the Family and Education (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 11. For an interesting history of the relationship among class, gender and teaching, see June Purvis, ‘Women and Teaching in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Roger Dale, Geoff Esland, Ross Fergusson, and Madeleine MacDonald (eds.), Education and the State, Vol. 2: Politics, Patriarchy and Practice (Barcombe, Sussex: Falmer Press, 1981), pp. 359–375. I am wary of using a concept such as patriarchy, since its very status is problematic. As Rowbotham notes, ‘Patriarchy suggests a fatalistic submission which allows no space for the complexities of women’s defiance’ (quoted in Tricia Davis, ‘Stand by Your Men? Feminism and Socialism in the Eighties,’) in George Bridges and Rosalind Brunt (eds.), Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1981), p.  14. A history of women’s day-­to-day struggles falsifies any such theory of ‘fatalistic submission.’ 12. Jane Barker and Hazel Downing, ‘Word Processing and the Transformation of the Patriarchal Relations of Control in the Office,’ in Dale, Esland, Fergusson and MacDonald (eds.), Education and the State, Vol. 2, pp. 229–256. See also the discussion of deskilling in Edwards, Contested Terrain. 13. For an analysis of how such language has been employed by the state, see Michael W. Apple, ‘Common Curriculum and State Control,’ Discourse 2 (No. 4, 1982), 1–10, and James Donald, ‘Green Paper: Noise of a Crisis,’ Screen Education 30 (Spring 1979), 13–49. 14. See, for example, Seymour Sarason, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971). 15. Apple, Education and Power, and Susan Porter Benson, ‘The Clerking Sisterhood: Rationalization and the Work Culture of Sales Women in American Department Stores,’ Radical America 12 (March/April 1978), 41–55. 16. Roger Dale’s discussion of contradictions between elements within the state is very interesting in this regard. See Roger Dale, ‘The State and Education: Some Theoretical Approaches,’ in The State and Politics of Education (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, E353,

130   Controlling the Work of Teachers Block 1, Part 2, Units 3–4, 1981), and Roger Dale, ‘Education and the Capitalist State: Contributions and Contradictions,’ in Apple (ed.), Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, pp. 127–161. 17. Dale, ‘The State and Education,’ p. 13. 18. I have examined this in greater detail in Apple, Education and Power. See as well Edwards, Contested Terrain, and Daniel Clawson, Bureaucracy and the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980). 19. Magali Larson, ‘Proletarianization and Educated Labor,’ Theory and Society 9 (No. 2, 1980), 166. 20. Ibid., 167. 21. Ibid. Larson points out that these problems related to intensification are often central grievances even among doctors. 22. Ibid., 168. 23. Ibid., 169. 24. Ibid., 167. 25. Apple, Education and Power. See also Carol Buswell, ‘Pedagogic Change and Social Change,’ British Journal of Sociology of Education 1 (No. 3, 1980), 293–306. 26. The question of just how seriously schools take this, the variability of their response, is not unimportant. As Popkewitz, Tabachnick, and Wehlage demonstrate in their interesting ethnographic study of school reform, not all schools use materials of this sort alike. See Thomas Popkewitz, B. Robert Tabachnick, and Gary Wehlage, The Myth of Educational Reform (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 27. This section of my analysis is based largely on research carried out by Andrew Gitlin. See Andrew Gitlin, ‘Understanding the Work of Teachers,’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980. 28. Ibid., 208. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 197. 31. Ibid., 237. 32. Ibid., 125. 33. Ibid., 197. 34. This is similar to the use of liberal discourse by popular classes to struggle for person rights against established property rights over the past one hundred years. See Herbert Gintis, ‘Communication and Politics,’ Socialist Review 10 (March/June 1980), 189–232. The process is partly paradoxical, however. Attempts to professionalize do give women a weapon against some aspects of patriarchal relations; yet, there is a clear connection between being counted as a profession and being populated largely by men. In fact, one of the things that are very visible historically is the relationship between the sexual division of labor and professionalization. There has been a decided tendency for full professional status to be granted only when an activity is ‘dominated by men—in both management and the ranks.’ Jeff Hearn, ‘Notes on Patriarchy: Professionalization and the Semi-­Professions,’ Sociology 16 (May 1982), 195. 35. Magali Larson, ‘Monopolies of Competence and Bourgeois Ideology,’ in Dale, Esland, Fergusson, and MacDonald (eds.), Education and the State, Vol. 2, p. 332. 36. Larson, ‘Proletarianization and Educated Labor,’ p. 152. Historically, class as well as gender dynamics have been quite important here, and recent research documents this clearly. As Barry Bergen has shown in his recent study of the growth of the relationship between class and gender in the professionalization of elementary school teaching in England, a large portion of elementary school teachers were both women and of the working class. As he puts it: Teaching, except at the university level, was not highly regarded by the middle class to begin with, and teaching in the elementary schools was the lowest rung on the teaching ladder. The middle class did not view elementary teaching as a means of upward mobility. But the elementary school teachers seemed to view themselves as having risen above

Controlling the Work of Teachers   131 the working class, if not having reached the middle class. . . . Clearly, the varied attempts of elementary teachers to professionalize constitute an attempt to raise their class position from an interstitial one between the working class and middle class to the solidly middle class position of a profession. See Barry H. Bergen, ‘Only a Schoolmaster: Gender, Class, and the Effort to Professionalize Elementary Teaching in England, 1870–1910,’ History of Education Quarterly 22 (Spring 1982), 10. 37. Gitlin, ‘Understanding the Work of Teachers,’ p. 128. 38. Ibid. 39. Martin Lawn and Jenny Ozga, ‘Teachers: Professionalism, Class and Proletarianization,’ unpublished paper, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 1981, p. 15 in mimeo. 40. Jenny Ozga, ‘The Politics of the Teaching Profession,’ in The Politics of Schools and Teaching (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, E353, Block 6, Units 14–15, 1981), p. 24. 41. We need to be very careful here, of course. Certainly, not all teachers will respond in this way. That some will not points to the partial and important fracturing of dominant gender and class ideologies in ways that signal significant alterations in the consciousness of teachers. Whether these alterations are always progressive is an interesting question. Also, as Connell has shown, such ‘feminine’ approaches are often important counterbalances to masculinist forms of authority in schools. See R.  W. Connell, Teachers’ Work (Boston and London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). 42. See Henry Giroux, ‘Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A critical Analysis,’ Harvard Educational Review 53 (August 1983), 257–293, even though he is not specifically interested in gender relations. 43. While I have focused here on the possible impacts in the school and the home on women teachers, a similar analysis needs to be done on men. We need to ask how masculinist ideologies work through male teachers and administrators. Furthermore, what changes, conflicts, and tensions will evolve, say, in the patriarchal authority structures of the home given the intensification of men’s labor? I would like to thank Sandra Acker for raising this critically important point. For an analysis of changes in women’s labor in the home, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 44. Clawson, Bureaucracy and the Labor Process, pp. 152–153. 45. In addition, Connell makes the interesting point that since teachers’ work has no identifiable object that it ‘produces,’ it can be intensified nearly indefinitely. See Connell, Teachers’ Work, p. 86. 46. Apple, Education and Power, and Manuel Castells, The Economic Crisis and American Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

7 The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum Culture as Lived—I

Introduction In Chapter 2, by treating culture as part of the larger process of commodification and accumulation, I examined the ways in which the educational system produces particular kinds of knowledge that are ultimately accumulated and used in the economic sphere, and how its political role sometimes complements and contradicts this. I cautioned us not to assume, though, that there is necessarily always a successful correspondence between what industry needs in terms of cultural capital or the norms and dispositions—the ideology—of its workers and what happens in schools. Because students are stratified based on the categories of deviance generated in part by the productive function of the educational system, this does not mean that we need to accept the idea that the “bottom layers” of these students necessarily get a hidden curriculum that prepares them simply to fit into and accept their place on the lower rungs of the “economic ladder.” In fact, we should be very careful about assuming that the ideologies and processes of control that accompany the growth of technical/administrative knowledge are always successfully employed. I shall demonstrate in this and the next chapter that, because culture is also lived, because of what might be called the intersection of the economic and cultural spheres, these ideologies and processes may not lead to a straightforward imposition of control in either the workplace or the school. Just as the school’s role as a productive and reproductive apparatus needs to be interpreted as being generated out of contradictory pressures upon it, so too do we need to see that the actual employment and ultimate effects of technical/administrative knowledge in the workplace itself are also a result of similar contradictions. Once again, the notion that a simple process of reproduction is going on will have to be cast aside.

Beyond Simple Reproduction The laws of physics determine the shape any object will take in an ordinary mirror. The image may be distorted by imperfections in the glass, but, by and large, what you see is what you have got. The internal composition of the mirror reproduces the external object standing over it. This set of laws may be good for thinking about optics, but it is questionable whether it is adequate for thinking about schools. We, especially many of us on the left side of the political spectrum, tend to act as if it is adequate, however. We

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   133 see schools as a mirror of society, especially in the school’s hidden curriculum. A “society” needs docile workers; schools, through their social relations and covert teaching, roughly guarantee the production of such docility. Obedient workers in the labor market are mirrored in the “market-­place of ideas” in the school. As I shall try and show in this chapter, though, such mirror image analogies are a bit too simple both in the school and in the supposedly mirrored external object, the workplace. The assumptions behind most recent analyses of the hidden curriculum can generally be grouped around a theory of correspondence. Broadly, correspondence theories imply that there are specific characteristics, behavioral traits, skills, and dispositions that an economy requires of its workers. These economic needs are so powerful as to “determine” what goes on in other sectors of a society, particularly the school. Thus, if we look at our educational institutions we should expect to find that the tacit things that are taught to students roughly mirror the personality and dispositional traits that these students will “require” later on when they join the labor market. One of the most recent explications of this kind of analysis is, of course, found in Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America. Here the hidden curriculum is differentiated by economic class and by one’s expected economic trajectory. The arguments presented by Bowles and Gintis have led a number of investigators to argue that this differential hidden curriculum can be seen in the fact that working-­class students are taught punctuality, neatness, respect for authority, and other elements of habit formation. The students of more advanced classes are taught intellectual open-­ mindedness, problem-­solving, flexibility, and so on, skills and dispositions that will enable them to function as managers and professionals, not as unskilled or semi-skilled laborers. Though the socio-­economic causes of this differentiated hidden curriculum are seen as quite complex, still the fundamental role of the school is seen as the rough reproduction of the division of labor outside of it. The school is a determined institution. Now social phenomenologists, philosophers of science, critical social theorists, and others have maintained that how we act on the world, be it the educational, economic, or political world, is in part determined by the way we perceive it. While this point can be so general as to be relatively inconsequential, it is important that the ties between perception and action are not ignored. This is especially true in any serious analysis of schooling that wishes to go beyond correspondence theories. Correspondence theories tend to “cause” us to see the school only in reproductive terms. Its logic sees the institution as acting only to reproduce a social order. Both the form and content of the formal corpus of school knowledge and the hidden curriculum help create the conditions for the cultural and economic reproduction of class relations in our society. There certainly is evidence to support this kind of assertion, some of which I have contributed myself.1 However, by seeing the school in only reproductive terms, in essence as a passive function of an external unequal social order, it is hard to generate any serious educational action whatsoever. For if schools are wholly determined and can do no more than mirror economic relations outside of them, then nothing can be done within the educational sphere. This is pessimistic, of course, and is an argument to which I shall return later on in this discussion. Yet there is something besides its pessimistic perspective that we must point to. It is, in some very important ways, also inadequate as a theory of the relationship both among all social institutions and

134   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum between the school and other powerful socio-­economic forces. For the concept of reproduction does not exhaust the nexus of relationships that ties institutions and people to each other. It may be an important element; however, there will be constitutive aspects of day to day life that can best be described not as mirror images of what larger economic and social forces require, but as genuinely contradictory. Thus, by focusing on schools only as reproductive institutions, we may miss the dynamic interplay between education and an economy and be in danger of reducing the complexity of this relationship to a bare parody of what actually exists at the level of practice. In order to go beyond this, we need to think more clearly about the range of ways institutions and people may be “determined.” What “modes of determination” actually exist, modes that go beyond “mere” reproduction? While these are actually heuristic devices that might enable us to see how the institutions of a society are dialectically interrelated, we can distinguish at least six modes of determination that represent the structural constraints and contradictions present in a given society. These include: (1) structural limitations; (2) selection; (3) reproduction/nonreproduction; (4) limits of functional compatibility; (5) transformation, and (6) mediation. These can be specified further: to what extent any institutional structure like the school or the workplace can vary (an example of structural limitation); the mechanisms such as funding patterns, economic and political support, and state interventions that exclude certain possible decisions (an example of selection); what aspects of a set of institutions or relations are functional to the basic recreation of, say, a mode of production or an ideological practice (an example of reproduction/nonreproduction); what aspects of institutional structures and cultural practices are not merely reproductive but are genuinely contradictory (an example of the limits of functional compatibility); what processes work their way through and help shape the interaction among these elements, such as class struggle (an example of mediation); and, finally, what concrete actions and struggles are now altering these institutions and processes in important ways (an example of transformation).2 Given this set of relationships, relationships that enable us to go well beyond mirror image analogies, in this chapter I shall take two of these—mediation and transformation—and use them to begin to unpack some of the possible complexity associated with the hidden curriculum and culture as lived not commodified. In Chapter 1, I argued that the traditional literature on the hidden curriculum has been guided by an overly restricted view of socialization. The conceptual weaknesses of this approach (Is a one-­way perspective on socialization an adequate metaphor for illuminating what happens in schools?) make its continued dominance questionable. Yet as we shall see in much more depth in the next chapter, just as important is an empirical issue. Is it accurate? Do students always internalize these norms and dispositions unquestioningly? One way of uncovering this is to work backwards, starting from the places where people actually work.

The Hidden Curriculum and the Norms of the Workplace The status of theories of the hidden curriculum does not only depend on the accuracy of their perception of what actually occurs in classrooms. There is another end to the rope which binds schools to outside agencies. Here I am talking about the workplace

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   135 itself. For one could describe the reality of what is taught to students with exceptional clarity and still be wrong about the actual effects this hidden teaching has, if the norms and values that organize and guide the day to day subjective lives of workers are not the same as those found in schools. In the rest of this chapter, hence, I want to give a portion of the other side of this picture. I want to claim that the hidden curriculum literature, because of its overly deterministic model of socialization and its exclusive focus on reproduction to the exclusion of other things that may be happening, has a tendency to portray workers as something like automatons who are wholly controlled by the modes of production, technical and administrative procedures, and ideological forms of our society. In more theoretical terms, agents exist (as abstract social roles), but they have no agency. In a real sense, then, structures exist, actors don’t.3 I also want to claim something else. I want to argue that such overly deterministic and economistic accounts of the hidden curriculum are themselves elements of the subtle reproduction, at an ideological level, of perspectives required for the legitimation of inequality. What I mean to say is simply this. The analyses recently produced by a number of leftist scholars and educators are themselves reproductions of the ideological vision of corporate domination. By seeing schools as total reflections of an unequal “labor market,” a market where workers simply do what they are told and passively acquiesce to the norms and authority relations of the workplace, these analyses accept as empirically accurate the ideology of management. In order to unpack these issues, we shall have to examine the labor process itself. A good deal of the recent writings on the relationship between the hidden curriculum and the labor process has been strongly influenced by work such as Harry Braverman’s exceptionally important historical investigation of the growth of corporate procedures for ensuring management control of the production process.4 Braverman makes a powerful case for the relentless penetration of corporate logic into the organization and control of day to day life in the workplace. In his portrayal, workers are continually deskilled (and, of course, some are “reskilled”). The skills they once had—skills of planning, of understanding and acting on an entire phase of production—are ultimately taken from them by management and housed elsewhere in a planning department controlled by management.5 In order for corporate accumulation to proceed, planning must be separated from execution, mental labor separated from manual labor, and this separation needs to be institutionalized in a systematic and formal manner. The archetypical example of this is, of course, Taylorism and its many variants. In plain words, management plans, workers merely execute. Thus, a major organizing principle of the workplace must be “taking the managers’ brains from under the workman’s cap.”6 This kind of analysis is a major contribution, not the least in its “demystification” of a number of assumptions held by many educators, policy analysts, and others. In particular, it serves to raise serious questions about our assumption that there is a widespread historical tendency toward increasing the skill level in industrial occupations throughout our economy. It is just as correct, Braverman maintains, to see the opposite of this. One can see the corporate expropriation of skill and knowledge, the rationalization of the workplace, and the increasing centralization of control of work so that all important decisions are made away from the point of production.7

136   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum Braverman also sees something else, though, to complete this story. As the process of deskilling—or what can be called the degradation of work—proceeds, workers also continuously lose power. While it is never totally successful, as corporate logic and power enter even more aspects of their lives and institutions, workers become appendages to the production process. They are ultimately confronted by the fruits of the knowledge originally generated in part out of the educational apparatus and by the uses of Taylorism and scientific management, by human relations management techniques, or finally by the threat of authority. In the face of all this, workers can do little. Caught in management’s web, they are relatively passive, obedient, and hard working. The cash nexus replaces craft and worker control. While Braverman does not expressly point to this, the differentiated hidden curriculum in school has served to prepare them well, for if this is what the inexorable logic of corporate control is like, then we should expect that workers will need particular norms and dispositions to function within a hierarchical labor market. They will need habits that contribute to the smooth and rational flow of production. They will need to acquiesce to “expert” authority. They will not need collective commitment, a sense of craft, creativity, or control. However, just as there are serious weaknesses in looking at schools in only reproductive terms (and thereby missing what I shall document in Chapter 4—the possible ways day to day life and the internal history of schools mediate and often provide the possibility for some students to act against powerful social messages), so too can this view, so powerfully put by Braverman, cause us to neglect similar things that may occur in the workplace. Let us look at this much more closely. What do we find at the level of execution, on the shop-­floor itself? Do the inexor­ able logic and techniques of capital call forth the lessons learned (or at least taught) in the hidden curriculum in school? Here, an examination of the separation of conception or planning from execution may be helpful. Recent research on the history of the relations between management and labor, especially of Taylorism, paints a somewhat different picture than that of Braverman. It is becoming increasingly clear that what is missing in this account is the actual response of workers to these expected norms and organizational strategies and their ability to resist them. This general point is clearly documented by Burawoy. It is one thing for management to appropriate knowledge, it is another thing to monopolize it. Braverman himself says “. . . since the workers are not destroyed as human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always remain in some degree a threat to capital.” Rather than a separation of conception and execution, we find a separation of workers’ conception and management’s conception, of workers’ knowledge and management’s knowledge. The attempt to enforce Taylorism leads workers to recreate the unity of conception and execution but in opposition to management rulings. Workers show much ingenuity in defeating and out-­witting the agents of scientific management before, during and after the “appropriation of knowledge.” In any shop there are “official” or “management approved” ways of performing tasks and there is the workers’ lore devised and revised in response to any management offensive.8

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   137 In essence, study after study has confirmed the fact that a large proportion of working adults have been able to continue their own collective setting of informal production norms and their ability to “defy” the supervisor and the “expert.”9 In fact, one of the major results of the attempts to separate conception from execution totally and to emphasize worker compliance and obedience to management in the pursuit of management’s expanding production goals was exactly the opposite of what managers intended. Rather than always creating a “compliant work-­force,” it quite often promoted resistance, conflict, and struggle. It heightened collective action by workers at the point of production and in so doing also often undermined both management control and the norms that were “required” in the workplace.10 These forms of resistance have an exceptionally long history, as we know. That there was a constant and bitter struggle in which workers were deeply concerned with “management prerogatives” is documented by the fact that the early waves of industrial strikes were often most fiercely fought around union rules and recognition, and around sympathetic strikes with other workers who had similar grievances. The bitterest losses were these strikes. Strikes over wages were eminently successful,11 thereby giving us some insight into why unions became somewhat more economistic. Yet even wage demands often hid (and still do) a smoldering anger at managerial methods. For example, in the famous strikes by munitions workers when Taylorism was introduced, the issue seemed to be over pay scales of tool makers that ranged from thirty-­eight to ninety cents an hour depending on one’s job assignment. However, these machinists were demanding a standard wage rate for all of them. This was actually an indirect challenge to a whole array of management practices, including management’s “right” to divide labor and establish new and often arbitrary job classifications that were to be taken out of the workers’ hands.12 Even relatively unskilled workers struggled over both wages and control. Indeed, again it is hard to separate the two out even analytically. When management engaged in “speed ups” or used what seemed to be arbitrary authority to increase the pace of the work—thereby getting more production out of the same labor in the same time—laborers’ resistances often took the form of “continuous, covert, self-­organization by small informal groups at work.”13 These served both to buttress their own informal systems of control and to prevent further economic exploitation. During economic crises, similar things came to the fore. In times of economic difficulty when it looked as if layoffs were in the offing, many workers traditionally slowed down. Both organized and unorganized workers found ways of protecting older workers who might not be able to keep up with the expanded pace of the work, and engaged in other action to maintain both jobs and control.14 These are historical examples; yet we must be very careful of assuming that they are merely of historical interest. Rather, the control of production by workers was not a static thing that existed and then ceased to exist at any one point in time. Instead, it was, and is, a continuous struggle which has taken a variety of forms.15 Partial support for my claims here—that workers at a variety of levels have and do often subtly resist, that they are not as truly and fully socialized to be obedient operatives as correspondence theories would have it—can be found in the literature on bureaucratic control. This is summarized in a recent investigation of the growth of bureaucratic mechanisms in the workplace by Daniel Clawson. He argues, after a

138   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum t­ horough review of research on the topic, that the rapid growth of bureaucratic controls is evidence of the struggle by blue- and white-­collar workers. For if all workers could be counted upon to be obedient and respect authority, if they continued to work as hard as they could, if they didn’t “take materials that didn’t belong to them,” and if they always followed what management wanted them to do, then the enormous cost of bureaucratic and hierarchical supervision and control would not have to be paid.16 While there is clearly a danger in overstating this case, it is largely confirmed by other investigators. For example, a number of writers argue that not only is the growing bureaucratization of the workplace a response to workers’ attempts to maintain some element of control, but bureaucratic control has itself often engendered even more conflict. Richard Edwards makes this point rather well. Thus bureaucratic control has created among American workers vast discontent, dissatisfaction, resentment, frustration, and boredom with their work. We do not need to recount here the many studies measuring alienation: the famous HEW-­ commissioned report, Work in America, among other summaries, has already done that. It argued, for example, that the best index of job satisfaction or dissatisfaction is a worker’s response to the question: “What type of work would you try to get into if you could start all over again?” A majority of both blue- and white-­ collar workers—and an increasing proportion of them over time—indicated that they would choose some different type of work. This overall result is consistent with a very large literature on the topic. Rising dissatisfaction and alienation among workers, made exigent by their greater job security and expectations of continuing employment with one enterprise, directly create problems for employers (most prominently reduced productivity).17 This very conflict has forced employers to introduce plans for job enrichment, job enlargement, worker self-­management, worker–employer co-­management, and so on. Yet we should not forget that these very plans may ultimately threaten the control of employers over the workplace. Thus, as Edwards contends, “the trouble is that a little is never enough. Just as some job security leads to demands for guaranteed lifetime wages, so some control over workplace decisions raises the demand for industrial democracy.”18 As David Montgomery reminds us, the history of the growth of management control of the workplace is not a simple story of imposition. A complete account must always emphasize “the initiatives of the workers themselves, rather than the ways in which they were manipulated by those in authority over them.”19 As he goes on to note, worker resistance and their own articulate programs for control have often been the causes, not only the effects of the rapid evolution and diffusion of management practices. Even such practices as “modern” personnel management were developed as “cooptive and repressive responses” to initiatives coming from workers.20 How are we to understand all of this? Correspondence theories would have it that schools are exceptionally successful in teaching specific norms that are lived out at the workplace. Yet, at best, if these recent investigators of the actual working out of the labor process are correct, this supposed correspondence can only partially describe

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   139 what is lived out at the workplace. We shall need to go into this in somewhat more detail. If we are to understand the actual lives of workers at a variety of levels of the “occupational ladder,” an important key is what has been called work culture. Work culture is not easily visible to the outsider and, like studies of the hidden curriculum, requires living within it to come close to comprehending its subtleties and organization. However, even with its subtle character, informal practices, and clear variations, it can generally be defined as “a relatively autonomous sphere of action on the job, a realm of informal, customary values and rules which mediates the formal authority structure of the workplace and distances workers from its impact.”21 In essence, work culture, as a “relatively autonomous sphere of action,” is not necessarily only a reproductive form. It constitutes a realm of action that in part provides both strength and the possibility of transformative activity. This very work culture provides a ground for the development of alternative norms, norms that are quite a bit richer than those pictured by theories of bare correspondence. These norms provide a locus for worker resistance, at least partial control of skills, pacing, and knowledge, collectivity rather than complete fragmentation of tasks, and some degree of autonomy from management. On close examination, there are a number of norms that pervade the workplace in many industries, norms that give more than a mere semblance of autonomy and that “are manifested every day in the forms of interaction that reproduce the work culture.” Among the strongest of these is cooperation as exemplified in work sharing arrangements. An instance of this is the practice of workers saving finished pieces in the wood and metal working industries. These pieces are lent to other workers “who have had a hard day (because of machine breakdown, because they do not feel good, etc.).”22 Significant counter examples to passive acquiescence, deskilling, and loss of control are found elsewhere as well. Industrial workers in, say, steel mills in particular have maintained a significant degree of worker autonomy by developing and redeveloping a shop-­floor culture that allows them a very real role in production. Even within highly mechanized industries, worker “militancy” to protect what is not mislabeled as “solidarity” is clear. Steve Packard’s account of day to day life in the steel mills documents this rather well. Here is one example. One day a white craneman was assigned to a good crane that should have gone to a black. Black cranemen decided to sabotage production until this bullshit was straightened out. They had mild support from most white cranemen, who also thought the foreman was wrong. Nothing can operate without the cranes bringing and taking steel, so blacks quietly stopped the whole mill. They kept the cranes in lowest gear and worked in super slow motion. Foremen soon began hatching out of their offices, looking around, rubbing their eyes in disbelief. It was like the whole building popped LSD or the air had turned into some kind of thick jelly: everything but the foremen moved at one tenth of normal speed.23 Here is a prime example of how the control of workers by management is less than total, to say the least. The unspoken cultural life within the mill, the power of workers’

140   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum cooperation, provides substantial reins on the norms of profit, authority, and productivity sought by the employers.24 This resistance, as we know, has often been turned into avenues that are overly economistic. We strike and bargain over wages and benefits, not as often over control and power.25 In certain industries, of course—coal mines provide one example here— the tradition of overt resistance is still very visible. Yet, overt and formally organized resistance (or even the relative lack of it at times) is not as significant to my argument as the fact of informal resistance to control at the point of production.26 For rather than being left, as Noble puts it, with a corporate juggernaut on one side and impotence and total despair on the other, we find evidence to the contrary again at the level of informal practices. Thus, in the metal-­working industry, new technologies have been developed over the years with the express purpose of increasing production and deskilling occupations. They, thereby, would increase the rate of capital accumulation in two ways—more goods sold and less salary paid to workers who were mere “button pushers.” Among the most significant of these technologies was the development in recent decades of numerical control. In brief, numerical control entails the specifications of a part that is to be produced on the machine being broken down into a mathematical representation of that part. These representations are then themselves translated into a mathematical description of the desired path of the cutting machine that will make the part. This leads, finally, to a system of control in which hundreds or thousands of discrete instructions are translated into a numerical code that is automatically read by the machinery. Numerical control, hence, is a means of totally separating conception from execution, of “circumventing [the worker’s] role as a source of the intelligence in production (in theory)” and of management getting greater control over, and compliance from, its employees.27 The stress on “in theory” is important here. The introduction of numerical control has not been uneventful. Let me be specific here. Overt and covert resistance was and is quite common. Strikes and work stoppages have not been unusual. At the Lynn, Massachusetts General Electric plant, the introduction of numerical controls caused a strike that shut down the factory for a month. Workers saw the issue clearly. As one machine operator put it: The introduction of automation means that our skills are being down-­graded and instead of having the prospect of moving up to a more interesting job we now have the prospect of either unemployment or a dead-­end job. But there are alternatives that unions can explore. We have to establish the position that the fruits of technical change can be divided up—some to the workers, not all to management as is the case today. We must demand that the machinist rise with the complexity of the machine. Thus, rather than dividing his job up, the machinist should be trained to program and repair his equipment—a task well within the grasp of most people in industry. Demands such as this strike at the heart of management prerogative clauses which are in many collective bargaining contracts. Thus, to deal with automation effectively, one has to strike at another prime ingredient of business unionism: the idea of “let the management run the business.” The introduction of [numerical control] equipment makes it imperative that we fight such ideas.28

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   141 This is clearly overt and organized resistance and struggle. But what about the informal norms of the work culture on the shop-­floor? What happens there? Do workers there embody the norms of obedience to authority, punctuality, etc. when there is not a strike? While in theory under numerical control all that a machine operator must do is to press buttons to stop or start the machine and continue to load and unload it, this rarely happens. Here too the actual process of work at the point of production does not necessarily correspond to the norms “required.” On the shop-­floor, one often finds workers engaged in what is called “pacing” or “the 70 percent syndrome”—the collective restriction of output on the floor by workers cooperating to set the speed at which the machine is fed at 70–80 percent of capacity. One can again often find workers running the machine harder to get enough products to help each other out. And, finally, there are the more subtle forms of resistance in terms of negative and uncooperative attitudes and the lack of “willing acceptance of authority.” As some managers note: “When you put a guy on an N.C. machine, he gets temperamental. . . . And then, through a process of osmosis, the machine gets temperamental.”29

Women at Work So far I have painted a picture of workers who were predominantly male and industrial in my attempt to uncover whether the hidden curriculum literature is correct in seeing a correspondence between what is supposed to be taught to working-­class children in schools and what is “required” in their later participation in a stratified labor market. Yet what about women? If male workers then and now often show serious signs of collective commitment, struggle, and attempts to maintain control of their skills and knowledge (though often informally)—and hence act against and do not necessarily reproduce the expected norms of the labor market—can we say the same for other groups of workers? Even given the relative recency of a large body of research on women’s day to day work, a number of striking points emerge from the literature. Women were often quite effective in resisting the production requirements and norms handed down by management in factories. In the shoe and garment industries, “the effective unionization of women operatives was likely to have a remarkably radicalizing impact on the organization.” Sharing, mutual respect, resistance to management control, all of these counterbalancing norms came to the fore even more noticeably when, say, women shoe workers were organized along with men. Here, at least, women workers were quite aggressive in their relationship with their employers.30 This was not the case “only” with women in factories. Much the same is found in areas of employment that for a variety of economic and ideological reasons have consciously sought to hire women, such as clerical and sales work.31 Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this can be seen in the latter areas, that of working in retail stores. Examples of subtle resistance among saleswomen abound. For instance, when management directives designed to tighten up obedience out on the sales floor interfered with the established informal rules that maintained the work culture, they were often quite effectively sabotaged or altered. If these directives included extra duties, they were often merely refused or fought back informally. Saleswomen would engage in sloppy or “eccentric” work when setting up new displays. As a group, they might take

142   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum back the time management had extracted from them for these extra duties by unilaterally extending the lunch-­hour. Or, they could visibly insult the authority of management by, say, purposely ignoring the requirements of the store’s dress code.32 The countervailing norms of the work culture frequently went further. Since so much of a saleswoman’s work was public, since it was carried out on the sales floor, many employees developed rather clever ways of turning back management harassment and abuse of authority. Saleswomen could easily embarrass a buyer or a floor manager in front of his or her superiors or an important customer. Further, solidarity against management directives and control was repeatedly enforced by informal sanctions. A saleswoman who transgressed the work culture could find her stock mysteriously messed up. Shins could be banged into by drawers. And like floor managers, the transgressor could be embarrassed before customers and higher management.33 All of this does not leave one with a sense of total worker internalization of and acquiescence in the face of the imperatives of the norms and values of management ideology. The resistance and collective commitment went further in many stores. The work culture on the sales floor also developed important ways of controlling the pacing and meaning of work, ways that mirror those found in my earlier discussion of day to day life on the shop floor. Just as in the factory, where workers found ways effectively to transform, mute, or work against the demands of management, so too did clerks develop a work culture that could effectively set limits on output and dampen competitiveness among departments in sales. These tactics are nicely illustrated in the following discussion. Each department had a concept of the total sales that constituted a good day’s work. Saleswomen used various tactics to keep their “books” (sales tallies) within accept­ able limits: running unusually low books would imperil a worker’s status with management just as extraordinarily high books would put her in the bad graces of her peers. Individual clerks would avoid customers late in the day when their books were running high, or call other clerks to help them. Saleswomen managed to approximate the informal quota with impressive regularity, ironing out the fluctu­ ations in customers’ buying habits in ways the management never dreamed of. They adjusted the number of transactions they completed to compensate for the size of the purchases; if they made a few large sales early in the day, they might then retire to do stockwork. During the slow summer season or during inclement weather, they were more aggressive with the smaller volume of customers; at peak seasons, they ignored customers who might put them over their quota.34 Managers were not the only recipients of these kinds of informal practices. Customers came in for their share, too, a share that naturally arises since, unlike the factory, the sales floor involves not just the production of goods but the “production of customers.” Through subtle ways—picking and choosing among waiting customers, pretending not to notice customers while doing stock work or having a conversation with one’s peers, disappearing into the storeroom, rudeness, and so on—saleswomen communicated a hidden message to both management and the customer. We take customers on our terms not yours. While you might have a superior class position, we have the upper hand here—we control the merchandise.35

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   143 There are, of course, older examples one could point to. One would expect similar informal “cultural” practices to be found in secretarial work, for instance. However, the major point to be kept in mind brings into serious question the myth—and it may be just that—of the passive woman worker. As we have seen, men and women do have some agency. It may be informal and relatively disorganized, and hence may be at a cultural not a political level. But it exists in ways that are not simply reproductive. To speak metaphorically, the reproductive mirror has some serious cracks in it.

Against Romanticism In this chapter, I have sought to bring together a set of counterexamples to illuminate the partial quality of the research being done on the hidden curriculum in schools. I have argued that correspondence theories—even if they develop the ethnographic and statistical sophistication required to unpack what schools actually teach—are dependent upon the accuracy of their view of the labor process. The exclusive use of the metaphor of reproduction, however, leads them to accept the ideology of management (i.e., workers at all times are guided by the cash nexus, by authority, by expert planning, by the norms of punctuality and productivity) as a real description of what goes on outside the school. When the metaphor of reproduction is complemented by investigations describing other modes of determination such as mediation and transformation, among others, and when one examines the actual organization and control of the labor process, one finds a somewhat different picture of important aspects of the day to day life than one might expect. Rather than the labor process being totally controlled by the ideological, technical, and administrative rubrics of management, rather than hard and fast structures of authority and norms of punctuality and compliance, one sees a complex work culture. This very work culture provides important grounds for worker resistance, collective action, informal control of pacing and skill, and reasserting one’s humanity. In the counterexamples I have given here, men and women workers seem engaged in overt and informal activity that is somehow missed when we talk only in reproductive terms. These terms make us see the school and the workplace as black boxes.36 These are not unimportant points, for the organization and control of work in corporate economies cannot be understood without reference to the overt and covert attempts of workers to resist the rationalizing control of employers.37 A theory of the hidden curriculum that loses sight of this risks losing its conceptual vitality, to say nothing of its empirical accuracy. Castells points out the significance of workers’ resistance in structural terms. The main structural barrier in capitalist production and circulation is the workers’ resistance to exploitation. Since an increase in the rate of surplus value is the basic element required for the accumulation of capital, the struggle over the relative amount of paid and unpaid labor is the first determinant of the rate of exploitation and, therefore, of the rate of profit and the speed and shape of the accumulation process. This is not an undetermined factor. Historically, labor’s resistance tends to increase and capital is increasingly unable to appropriate the same amount of labor in absolute terms.38

144   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum When all this is said, however, we still must be very careful of appropriating an overly romantic outlook here. I have focused on the other side of the norms and dispositions that guide the workplace, norms and dispositions signifying struggle, resistance, conflict, and aspects of collective action that counterbalance the obedience, compliance, bureaucratic authority structure, and relations to the experts that management seeks to impose. Yet, while we need to see how the actual lived conditions at the workplace both mediate ideological and economic “requirements” and have transformative potential, we need to remember at all times that power is often unequal in factories, offices, shops, and stores. Struggle and conflict may indeed exist; but, that does not mean that it will be successful. The success is determined by the structural limitations and selection processes that occur in our day to day lives. There are powerful features within and outside the productive process that militate against a sense of collectivity and that exacerbate a sense of isolation and passivity. The “serial organization of production,” where assembly lines spread workers out over the vast interior landscape of factories (and now many offices), provides one obvious example.39 This is coupled with status and rank distinctions within the workplace so that even in areas not overtly like the factory—in the hospital, for instance—“there are often injunctions against fraternizing with workers of marginally different ranks and penalties against workers who seek to exercise initiative in the interests of good patient care.”40 Obviously, these are not exhaustive examples. (My earlier discussion of Taylorism and even newer time and motion measurement and control systems such as numerical control documents this.) However, they do point to how what might be called atomization or the creation of the abstract individual can and does go on.41 Any honest appraisal must not ignore Braverman’s analysis quoted earlier. Management has historically attempted to incorporate resistance and to extend its dominion over the workplace; while, as we have seen, it has met with varying degrees of success, it is also clear that many management techniques that were developed in response to worker knowledge and informal control and resistance have been relatively fruitful in two ways. First, while the early principles of scientific management were less than successful— and in fact often generated even more resistance on the part of workers—in actually controlling what went on in factories and offices, we need to remember that they had a second aim. And in this aim capital has been quite successful. The technical and administrative procedures were also introduced as part of a much larger ideological strategy to discredit the prevailing work practices in the public eye. Thus, labels such as “soldiering” were affixed by Taylor and others to all worker-­controlled craft rules and informal work-­sharing arrangements. In this way, the public (and ultimately labor itself ) could see that it was important to “relieve labor of responsibility not its own,” since in fact it was “immoral to hold up to this miscellaneous labor, as a class, the hope that it can ever manage industry.”42 The fact that only recently has labor begun again to raise serious questions about sharing that “labor of responsibility,” points to the relative success of management’s strategy here.43 Second, in large part through the process I described in Chapter 2, management did accumulate a reservoir of techniques and knowledge that could be employed when the time seemed right to continue both its rationalization of production and reassertion of control of labor.44

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   145 Among these techniques are some I have already mentioned: the rationalization of production (cost accounting systems, centralization of authority, formalization of bureaucratic and supervisory structures and procedures), the redivision of labor (transforming skilled into less skilled and standardized jobs, differential training and knowledge for management and workers, a strong division between mental and manual labor), and the design of technology (numerical control devices to eliminate worker knowledge and control, assembly line production where the pace of the line regulates the pace of the work). Other techniques include: hiring practices (a battery of tests given to prospective employees, selection of employees by economic background for low paying work, exclusion or inclusion by race or sex), corporate welfare policies (human relations training added on to Taylorism, “high” raises in times of expanding economy, bonuses, health and pension plans often granted “in trade for” more management control and no-­strike provisions), union policies (unions used to discipline militant workers and to standardize grievance procedures thereby eliminating wildcat strikes), and workplace location (the runaway shop where corporations move their factories and offices to locations where abundant and more compliant labor is available, threats of plant closings).45 There clearly may be many more. And even here these do not account for the ideological and economic pressures outside of the workplace that may “cause” men and women to accept both their work and their social life as pregiven and natural.46 Nor do they account for action by the state itself, as it regulates and assists in the process of capital accumulation, which will at times provide serious barriers to collective action. Still more could be said about the informal work culture as well. Many of these informal “attempts” at transformation, and the ways the work culture may mediate management ideology and pressures, may be turned back against the workers themselves. This is a critical point. For example, in some machine shops, workers “steal back” time and control by using their machines to create useless but often intricate objects called “homers.” Or they find ways of playing complicated games among themselves with the machines. Often the playing of games and the making of homers is apparent to management, but it does not intervene since it keeps workers both busy and relatively happy on the job and does not usually threaten production to an inordinate degree. In essence, the workers’ resistance to boredom and administrative/technical control and their own lived cultural forms produce what Michael Burawoy has called a type of Utopian escape.47 Leisure is defined as filling time with making useless objects; it becomes the absence of serious meaningful work. Struggle on the shop floor becomes transformed by the process of individual commodity production into playing games. While play may be culturally creative here—and this is not to be ignored—the ultimate contradictory effect may be to continue the depoliticization of the relationship between one’s labor, one’s products, and the process and control of production. A question we must ask, hence, is if, as I have maintained, these countervailing and relatively autonomous norms and practices exist, where, when, and how specifically may they ultimately be contradictory, perhaps even lending partial support to ideological and economic rubrics of control at an even deeper level?48 It is a question that will not be easy to answer; but, we cannot understand either the hidden curriculum or the labor process without asking it.

146   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum At the very least, the search for such an understanding requires us to take much more seriously the idea that the cultural sphere is not totally reducible to the economic. Paul Willis makes this point rather markedly when he argues against the prevailing tendency on the left to make culture—even that found among workers in the workplace itself—only an epiphenomenal “response” to or reflection of dominant economic or “productive” relations. As he puts it: There is no question, for me, of counterposing the “cultural” with the “productive” or the “real” as if the former had no actual constitutive role in the basic social relations which govern the form of our society. I am arguing against the trivialization of the notion of culture, of working class culture and especially its central domain: cultural relations/struggles/forms at the point of production. Culture is not simply a response to imposition which blinds or blunts a “proper” understanding, nor is it merely a compensation, an adjustment to defect—these are essentially mechanized, reactive, models. Cultural forms occupy precisely those same spaces and human potentialities which are fought over by capital to continue valorization and capital accumulation. There are different logics possible in the direct experience of production than are posed in the capital relation itself, for itself. Merely because capital would like to treat workers as robots does not mean they are robots. The direct experiences of production are worked through and over in the praxis of different cultural discourses. To be sure, these discourses do not arise purely on the basis of production, and many of their important contents and inner relationships arise from or in articulation with external forces and institutions: the family, state, labour organizations, etc. It is also clear that in this society, for the moment, the material consequences of these cultural forms are for continued production in the capitalist mode. But none of this should blind us to the complexities, struggles, and tensions on the shop floor even if they do not always call their name in a way we can recognize. There are forms of praxis arising from definite human agency at the site of production which, in the very same moment, provide the conditions for capitalist relations and also partially penetrate and variably challenge these relationships.49

Educational Action These arguments may seem a long way from the reality of classroom practice and curricular activity. After all, the academic debate about the conceptual issues and the empirical justification surrounding the hidden curriculum is, in part, just that—an academic debate about how we are to interpret what goes on in schools. However, besides the comparison between what happens in schools and its supposed effect on (or correspondence to) what occurs outside these institutions, a number of things need to be realized about this discussion. As I maintained previously, there are very real ties between conception and action. As I argued, a vision of the successful degradation of work unwittingly accepts on a conceptual level a management ideology, one that on a political level can lead to a cynicism or pessimism about the possibilities of any successful action in both the socio-­ economic arena and in the school. Or, it can cause us to wait for some cataclysmic event that will suddenly alter everything. Either one can ultimately lead to inactivity.

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   147 With this in mind, let us return to the pessimistic posture I pointed to earlier in this chapter. The position has it that schools can be no more than reproductive mirrors. Therefore, any action within them is doomed to failure. If I have been correct in my analysis here—that in nearly every real work situation, there will be elements of contradiction, of resistance, of relative autonomy, that have transformative potential, then the same should be true in schools. If we ignore these institutions we ignore something to which I shall return to in Chapter 5, the elemental fact that millions of people work in them. Because of their structural position as state employees, the conditions of their work can lead them to the beginnings of a serious appraisal of power and control in society. As the fiscal crisis of the state deepens, as the conditions of state employees become less secure because of the “crisis of accumulation,” as educational work enters more and more into the political and economic arena as I predict it will, this increases the possibility of self-­conscious organized action.50 Even on the level of informal work, the work culture of teachers (which undoubtedly exists, as I know from personal experience) can be used for educative purposes. It can be employed in a process of political education by using elements of it as exemplars of the very possibility of regaining at least partial control over the conditions of one’s work and for clarifying the structural determinations that set limits on progressive pedagogic activity.51 But action can be taken not only in the long slow process of enabling teachers to understand their situation. There is a great need for curricular action as well. Here I will not say much beyond what has been said by others who have struggled long and hard to introduce honest, controversial, and racially, sexually, and economically progressive material into schools.52 If resistances are found, if even only on an informal level we find men and women in our businesses, factories, and elsewhere struggling to maintain their knowledge, humanity, and pride, then curricular action maybe more important than we realize. For students need to see the history and legitimacy of these struggles. The teaching of serious labor history, organized around the countervailing norms generated by men and women who have resisted living out the hidden curriculum, could be one effective strategy for educational action here. As Raymond Williams reminds us, the overcoming of what he has called the “selective tradition” is essential for current emancipatory practice.53 How much we have lost due to this selective tradition is partially seen in the following quote from Montgomery. Not only did workers doggedly resist the employers’ efforts to introduce stopwatches and incentive pay, they also frequently formulated their own counter-­ proposals for industrial reorganization. On one level these included standard pay classifications, union control over reductions in the work force, the 8-hour day, and above all, management’s consent to treat with the workers’ elected delegates on all questions affecting the operation of the works. On another level, the unions of coal miners and railway workers, speaking from positions of unprecedented strength, demanded public ownership of their industries with a large managerial role for the employees, and conventions of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers openly debated ways to assume the management of the men’s clothing industry.54

148   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum A recognition of what we have lost, however, requires not only theoretical and historical analysis, but the ongoing production of viable curricular materials and teaching strategies that can be used in classrooms and elsewhere.55 Local political and organizational activity to provide the conditions necessary for even attempting to use new or previously prepared documented material obviously needs to be considered. The selective tradition has operated in such a way that the most widely employed curriculum materials now provide a less than significant sense of the heritage of a sizable portion of the population. Significant aspects of the labor movement are often systematically neglected, defined as outside the boundaries of “responsible” labor activity, or subject to editorial commentary that manages to disparage them.56 It is evident that concrete educational and political work could be done here. This educational and political work should not be limited to our formal educational system. Political education at the workplace—in our stores, offices, factories, and elsewhere can be (and is) going on. Since these active elements of a work culture exist, and since cultural processes of resistance, mediation, and transformation can be found, they can be worked with. Politically progressive educators, union organizers, informally and formally organized groups of women, men, black, hispanic, and other workers, and others can work together in finding non-­elitist forms of engaging in such overt action. This politicization is a perfect complement to the “democratization” of technical/administrative knowledge that I argued for in Chapter 2. But what about our understanding of the hidden, not the overt, curriculum? If simple models of reproduction and correspondence cannot adequately account for the complexity of day to day life in either schools or where people work, this has important implications for future research on the hidden curriculum. Again being careful about romanticizing the resistance to ideological and economic “determinations,” we should want to see if patterns of mediation, resistance, and partial transformation similar to those found in the workplace are found in the school. With the increasing encroachment of procedures for rationalization and management ideologies into schools (e.g., systems management, management by objectives, competency-­based instruction, the growth of national testing, and so on), do teachers respond in ways like those of the workers I have examined here? Do students, like those found in the study by Willis that I mentioned previously in Chapter 1, also act against, partially transform, or somehow engage in activity that goes beyond mere socialization to and reproduction of the norms and values considered legitimate in the hidden curriculum? Does this ultimately turn back against them at a deeper ideological level? Which students—by race, sex, and class—do what?57 These are the questions to which we shall now turn. We may find that much more is going on than meets the eye or than some of the more deterministic hidden curriculum theorists would have us believe. If determinations are seen not as producing mirror images, but as setting contradictory limits,58 limits that at the level of practice are often mediated by (and can potentially transform) the informal (and sometimes conscious) action of groups of people, then we can explore ways these limits are now being contested. In the process, we might find spaces where limits dissolve. There are few things more worthy of effort.

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   149

Notes   1. See Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control Volume 3 (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey, eds., Power and Ideology in Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1977); Ted Tapper and Brian Salter, Education and the Political Order (New York: Macmillan, 1978); and Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).   2. I am indebted to Erik Olin Wright’s discussion of these six modes of determination in his Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978), pp. 15–29. Wright’s analysis is more complex theoretically than I have presented here, especially his treatment of the roles that the state and economic and ideological crises play in these processes of determination.   3. See Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975); and Amy B. Bridges, “Nicos Poulantzas and the Marxist Theory of the State,” Politics and Society IV (Winter 1974), 161–190.   4. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).   5. David Montgomery, “Workers’ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” Labor History XVII (Fall 1976), 485–509.   6. Michael Burawoy, “Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process: Braverman and Beyond,” Politics and Society VIII (Number 3–4, 1979), p. 5 in mimeo copy. The basic elements of scientific management were actually rather simple and can be laid out in four basic principles. (1) There should be centralized planning and centralized routing of each of the successive phases of production. (2) Each distinct operation should be systematically analyzed and broken down into its simplest components or tasks. (3) In the performance of his or her task, each worker should be subject to detailed instruction and supervision. (4) Wage payments should be carefully designed to induce workers to do what the centralized planners and supervisors instructed them to do. See David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 114. For a more detailed look at Taylor’s personal relationship to scientific management see Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).   7. Burawoy, “Toward a Marxist Theory of the Labor Process,” 89.   8. Ibid., 33–34.   9. Ibid., 34. 10. Ibid., 40. See also the analysis of the “failure” of Taylorism in David Noble, America By Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 11. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, p. 24. 12. Ibid., p. 103. See also Noble, America By Design. 13. Ibid., p. 104. 14. Ibid., pp. 143–151. 15. Ibid., p. 10. 16. Daniel Clawson, “Class Struggle and the Rise of Bureaucracy,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1978. The relationship between the growth of bureaucratic management and the control of labor is also well documented in Clawson’s study. See also, Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 17. Edwards, Contested Terrain, p. 123. 18. Ibid., p.  124. Edwards distinguishes between three types of control: simple, technical, and bureaucratic. Each of these lends itself to and in part is a result of specific kinds of resistance. His analysis of these varying kinds of control will provide a good deal of the foundation for my own investigation in Chapter 5. 19. Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, p. 4. 20. Ibid. 21. Susan Porter Benson, “The Clerking Sisterhood: Rationalization and the Work Culture of Saleswomen in American Department Stores,” Radical America XII (March–April 1978), 41. My stress.

150   The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum 22. Stanley Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital,” The Insurgent Sociologist VIII (Fall 1978), 142. 23. Quoted in Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital,” 142. See also Steve Packard, Steelmill Blues (San Pedro, California: Singlejack Books, 1978) and Reg Theriault, Longshoring on the San Francisco Waterfront (San Pedro, California: Singlejack Books, 1978). 24. Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital,” 143. 25. See Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1973). 26. However, we should not forget that even such resistances can be “incorporated” by management (and our more conservative unions) so that resistance turns toward paths that do not threaten production. See, e.g., Michael Burawoy, “The Politics of Production and the Production of Politics: A Comparative Analysis of Piecework Machine Shops in the United States and Hungary,” in Political Power and Social Theory, in press. 27. David Noble, “Social Choice in Machine Design,” unpublished paper, 1979, p. 11. 28. Ibid., p. 48. 29. Ibid., pp. 45–46. 30. Montgomery, “Workers’ Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth Century,” 500–501. 31. See Sheila Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and Edith Altbach, Women in America (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1974). 32. Benson, “The Clerking Sisterhood,” 49. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 50. 35. Ibid., 51. 36. I have further discussed the problems of seeing institutions as if they were black boxes in Michael W. Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 37. Jeremy Brecher, “Uncovering the Hidden History of the American Workplace,” Review of Radical Political Economics X (Winter 1978), 3. 38. Manuel Castells, The Economic Crisis and American Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 48. It is important to remember that the forms of such resistance will change over time, however, depending on altered material and ideological conditions. 39. John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Work and Consciousness,” in R. Baxendall et al., eds., Technology, the Labor Process, and the Working Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), p. 13. 40. Ibid., p. 14. 41. On the creation of an abstract individual as an ideological form, see Michael W. Apple, “Ideology and Form in Curriculum Evaluation,” in George Willis, ed., Qualitative Evaluation (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1978); Apple, Ideology and Curriculum; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961); and Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973). 42. Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, p. 27. 43. See Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer, Economic Democracy (White Plains, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1980); and David Moberg, “Work in American Culture: The Ideal of Self-­ Determination and the Prospects for Socialism,” Socialist Review X (March–June 1980), 19–56. 44. See the interesting discussion in Nelson Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937–1955,” The Journal of American History LXVII (September 1980), 335–353. 45. Brecher, “Uncovering the Hidden History of the American Workplace,” 7–14. 46. The literature on the creation and recreation of ideological hegemony is becoming quite extensive and is obviously helpful in unpacking this issue. Among the most recent analyses that might be useful in pursuing this issue are Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975); Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley:

The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum   151 University of California Press, 1975); R.W. Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology: Working Papers in Cultural Studies X (Birmingham, England: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1977); John Brenkman, “Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization,” Social Text I (Winter 1979), 94–109; Stanley Aronowitz, “Film—The Art Form of Late Capitalism,” Social Text I (Winter 1979), 110–129; Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text I (Winter 1979), 130–148; and Todd Gitlin, “Television’s Screens: Hegemony in Transition,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education. 47. Burawoy, “The Politics of Production and the Production of Politics.” 48. I am indebted to a discussion with Paul Willis for my basic point here. 49. Paul Willis, “Shop Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form,” in John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson, eds., Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979), p. 187. 50. See James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1973); Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978); and Castells, The Economic Crisis and American Society. 51. Hinton’s discussion of “fanshen” is interesting here. See William Hinton, Fanshen (New York: Vintage, 1966). 52. Within mainstream curriculum work Fred Newmann’s continuing emphasis on public issues and community action programs deserves mention here. See also the discussion between Newmann and myself in Richard Weller, ed., Humanistic Education (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1977). 53. Williams, Marxism and Literature. 54. Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, p. 155. 55. See, for example, Pal Rydlberg, The History Book (Culver City, California: Peace Press, 1974); and Quebec Education Federation, Pour Une Journee Au Service De La Class Ouvriere (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, no date). 56. Jean Anyon, “Ideology and U.S. History Textbooks,” Harvard Educational Review XLIX (August 1979), 361–386; and Rich Fantasia, “The Treatment of Labor in Social Studies Textbooks,” unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1979. 57. I have purposely undertheorized my arguments in this chapter for ease of readability. On a theoretical level, my points here constitute part of a larger debate within the analysis of the relationship between economic and cultural reproduction. In essence, I want to claim that it is not only an epistemological possibility, but an actual accomplishment that large numbers of working people can create alternative and “relatively autonomous” forms of knowledge that are not merely representations of “bourgeois social categories.” This is done even in the face of both the power of the economic and cultural capital of dominant classes and the state apparatus in its various forms. My position here is similar to Willis and Aronowitz, who also argue strongly against both traditional base/superstructure formulas, and the overly deterministic theories of Althusser, the capitalistic logic school, and others. See, for example, Paul Willis, Learning to Labor (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1977); Paul Willis, “Class Struggle, Symbol and Discourse,” unpublished paper, University of Birmingham, 1979; and Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman and the Logic of Capital.” 58. See Apple, Ideology and Curriculum.

8 The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook

I We can talk about culture in two ways, as a lived process, as what Raymond Williams has called a whole way of life, or as a commodity.1 In the first, we focus on culture as a constitutive social process through which we live our daily lives. In the second, we emphasize the products of culture, the very thingness of the commodities we produce and consume. This distinction can, of course, be maintained only on an analytic level, because most of what seem to us to be things—like lightbulbs, cars, records, and, in the case of this essay, books—are really part of a larger social process. As Marx, for example, spent years trying to demonstrate, every product is an expression of embod­ ied human labor. Goods and services are relations among people, relations of exploita­tion often, but human relations nevertheless. Turning on a light when you walk into a room is not only using an object, it is also to be involved in an anonymous social relationship with the miner who worked to dig the coal burned to produce the electricity. This dual nature of culture poses a dilemma for those individuals who are interested in understanding the dynamics of popular and elite culture in our society. It makes studying the dominant cultural products—from films, to books, to television, to music—decidedly slippery, for there are sets of relations behind each of these “things.” And these in turn are situated within the larger web of the social and market relations of capitalism. Although there is a danger of falling into economic reductionism, it is essential that we look more closely at this political economy of culture. How do the dynamics of class, gender, and race “determine” cultural production? How is the organization and distribution of culture “mediated” by economic and social structures?2 What is the relationship between a cultural product—say, a film or a book—and the social relations of its production, accessibility, and consumption? These are not easy questions to deal with, in at least two ways. First, the very terms of these questions and the concepts we use to ask them are notoriously difficult to unpack. That is, words such as determine, mediate, social relations of production, and so on—and the conceptual apparatus that lies behind them—are not at all settled. There is as much contention over their use cur­ rently as there has ever been.3 Thus, it is hard to grapple with the issue of the determin­ ation of culture without at the same time being very self-­conscious of the tools one is employing to do it.

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   153 Second—and closely related to the first, perhaps because of the theoretical contro­ versies surrounding the topic—there have been fewer detailed and large-­scale empiri­ cal investigations of these relations recently than is necessary. While we may have interesting ideological or economic analyses of a television show, film, or book,4 there are really only a few well-­designed empirical studies that examine the economics and social relations involved in films and books in general. Because of this, it is hard to get a global picture. This hiatus is a problem in sociological analysis in general, and yet it is even more prob­ lematic in the field of education. Even though the overt aim of our institutions of school­ ing has more than a little to do with cultural products and processes, with cultural transmission, only in the last decade or so have the politics and economics of the culture actually transmitted in schools been taken up as a serious research problem. It was almost as if Durkheim and Weber, to say nothing of Marx, had never existed. In the area that has come to be called the sociology of the curriculum, however, steps have been taken to deal with this issue in some very interesting ways. A good deal of progress has in fact been made in understanding whose knowledge is taught and produced in our schools.5 While not the only topics with which we should be concerned, it is clear that major curriculum issues have to do with content and organization. What should be taught? In what way? Answering these is difficult. The first, for example, involves some very knotty epistemological issues—e.g., what should be granted the status of knowledge?— and is a politically loaded question as well. To borrow the language of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, the “cultural capital” of dominant classes and class segments has been considered the most legitimate knowledge.6 This knowledge, and one’s “ability” to deal with it, has served as one mechanism in a complex process in which the eco­ nomic and cultural reproduction of class, gender, and race relations is accomplished. Therefore, the choice of particular content and of particular ways of approaching it in schools is related both to existing relations of domination and to struggles to alter these relations. Not to recognize this is to ignore a wealth of evidence—in the United States, England, Australia, France, Sweden, Germany, and elsewhere—that links school know­ ledge, both commodified and lived, to class, gender, and race dynamics outside as well as inside our institutions of education.7 The recognition of the political nature of the curriculum, by itself, does not solve all of our problems. The statement that school knowledge has some (admittedly complex) connections to the larger political economy merely restates the issue. It does not in itself answer how these connections operate. Although the ties that link curricula to the inequalities and social struggles of our social formation are very complicated, research occasionally becomes available that helps to illuminate this nexus, even when it is not aimed, overtly, at an educational audience. I want to draw on this research to help us begin to uncover some of the connections between curriculum and the larger political economy. The most interesting of this research deals with the culture and commerce of publishing. It wants to examine the relationship between the ways in which publishing operates internally—its social relations and composition—and the cultural and economic market within which it is situated. What do the social and eco­ nomic relations within the publishing industry have to do with schools, with the pol­ itics of knowledge-­distribution in education? Perhaps this can be made clearer if we stop and think about the following question.

154   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook How is this “legitimate” knowledge made available in schools? By and large it is through something to which we have paid much too little attention—the textbook. Whether we like it or not, the curriculum in most American schools is not defined by courses of study or suggested programs, but by one particular artifact, the standard­ ized, grade-­level-specific text in mathematics, reading, social studies, science (when it is even taught), and so on. The impact of this on the social relations of the classroom is also immense. It is estimated, for example, that seventy-­five percent of the time ele­ mentary and secondary students are in classrooms and ninety percent of their time on homework is spent with text materials.8 Yet, even given the ubiquitous character of the textbook, it is one of the things we know least about. While the text dominates curric­ ula at the elementary, secondary, and even college levels, very little critical attention has been paid to the ideological, political, and economic sources of its production, dis­ tribution, and reception.9 In order to make sense out of this, we need to place the production of curricular materials such as texts back into the larger process of the production of cultural com­ modities—such as books—in general. There are approximately forty thousand books published each year in the United States.10 Obviously, these are quite varied, and only a small portion of them are textbooks. Yet, even with this variation, there are certain constants that act on publishers. We can identify four “major structural conditions” that by and large determine the shape of publishing currently in the United States. As Coser, Kadushin, and Powell state: (1) The industry sells its products—like any commodity—in a market, but a market that, in contrast to that for many other products, is fickle and often uncer­ tain. (2) The industry is decentralized among a number of sectors whose opera­ tions bear little resemblance to each other. (3) These operations are characterized by a mixture of modern mass-­production methods and craft-­like procedures. (4) The industry remains perilously poised between the requirements and restraints of commerce and the responsibilities and obligations that it must bear as a prime guardian of the symbolic culture of the nation. Although the tensions between the claims of commerce and culture seem to us always to have been with book pub­ lishing, they have become more acute and salient in the last twenty years.11 These conditions are not new phenomena by any means. From the time printing began as an industry, books were pieces of merchandise. They were, of course, often produced for scholarly or humanistic purposes, but before anything else their prime function was to earn their producers a living. Book production, hence, has historically rested on a foundation where from the outset it was necessary to “find enough capital to start work and then to print only those titles which would satisfy a clientele, and that at a price which would withstand competition.” Similar to the marketing of other products, then, finance and costing took an immensely important place in the decisions of publishers and booksellers.12 Febvre and Martin, in their analysis of the history of book printing in Europe, argue this point exceptionally clearly: One fact must not be lost sight of: the printer and the bookseller worked above all and from the beginning for profit. The story of the first joint enterprise, Fust and

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   155 Schoeffer, proves that. Like their modern counterparts, 15th-century publishers only financed the kind of book they felt would sell enough copies to show a profit in a reasonable time. We should not therefore be surprised to find that the imme­ diate effect of printing was merely to further increase the circulation of those works which had already enjoyed success in manuscript, and often to consign other less popular texts to oblivion. By multiplying books by the hundred and then thousand [compared to, say, the laborious copying of manuscripts], the press achieved both increased volume and at the same time more rigorous selection.13 Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s work, we can make a distinction between two types of “capital”—symbolic and financial. This enables us to distinguish among the many kinds of publishers one might find. In essence, these two kinds of capital are found in differ­ ent kinds of markets. Those firms that are more commercial, that are oriented to rapid turnover, quick obsolescence, and to the minimization of risks, are following a strategy for the accumulation of financial capital. Such a strategy has a strikingly different per­ spective on time, as well. It has a short time-­perspective, one that focuses on the current interests of a particular group of readers. In contradistinction to those publish­ ers whose market embodies the interests of finance capital, those firms whose goal is to maximize the accumulation of symbolic capital operate in such a way that their time-­ perspective is longer. Immediate profit is less important. Higher risks may be taken, and experimental content and form will find greater acceptance. These publishers are not uninterested in the “logic of profitability,” but long-­term accumulation is more im­ portant. One example is provided by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which sold only ten thousand copies in the first five years after its publication in 1952, yet then went on to sell sixty thousand copies as its rate of sales increased yearly by twenty percent.14 The conceptual distinction based on varying kinds of capital does not totally cover the differences among publishers in the kinds of books they publish, however. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, for example, further classify publishers according to the ways in which editors themselves carry out their work. In so doing, they distinguish among trade publishers, text publishers, and finally the various scholarly-­monograph or uni­ versity presses. Each of these labels not only refers to editorial policy, but also speaks to a wide array of differences concerning the kind of technology employed by the press, the bureaucratic and organizational structures that coordinate and control the day-­today work of the company, and the different risks and monetary and marketing policies of each. Each label also refers to important differences in relations with authors, in scheduling, and ultimately in defining what counts as “success.”15 Behind the commod­ ity, the book, stands indeed a whole set of human relations. These structural differences in organization, technology, and economic and social relations structure the practices of the people involved in producing books. This includes editors, authors, agents, and, to a lesser extent, sales and marketing personnel. Digging deeper into them also enables us to understand better the political economy of culture. By integrating analyses of internal decision-­making processes and external market relations within publishing we can gain a good deal of insight into how par­ ticular aspects of popular and elite culture are presented in published form. Let us set the stage for our further discussion historically. From the period just after the Civil War to the first decade of the twentieth century, fiction led in the sheer

156   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook quantity of titles that were published. We can see this if we take one year as an example. In 1886 Publishers Weekly took the nearly 5,000 books published in the U.S. and broke them down into various categories. Those ten categories with the most volumes were: fiction (1,080), law (469), juvenile (458), literary history and miscellaneous (388), theo­ logy (377), education and language (275), poetry and drama (220), history (182), medical science (177), and social and political science (174).16 These data do not account for the many informal political booklets and pamphlets that were published. But who the readership actually was, what the rates of literacy were between particular classes and genders, and what the economic conditions of publishing and purchasing were—all of this had an impact on what was published. These figures have tended to change markedly over the years. Yet it is not just the type of book published that is of import historically or currently. Form and content have been subject to the influences of the larger society as well. To take one example, market constraints have often had a profound impact on what gets published and even on what authors will write. Again, certain aspects of fiction-­writing and -publishing offer an interesting case in point. Wendy Griswold’s analysis of the manner in which different market positions occupied by various authors and publishers had an impact documents this nicely. In the nineteenth century, topics treated by European writers had a distinct market advantage in the United States, due to the oddities of our copyright laws. As Griswold states: During most of the 19th century, American copyright laws protected citizens or permanent residents of the United States but not foreign authors. The result was that British and other foreign works could be reprinted and sold in the United States without royalties being paid to their authors, while Americans did receive royalty payments. Many interests in the United States benefited from this literary piracy and lobbied to maintain the status quo. (Actually piracy is something of a misnomer, for the practice was perfectly legal.) The nascent printing industry was kept busy. Publishers made huge profits from reprinting foreign books. Readers had available the best foreign literature at low prices; for example, in 1843 A Christmas Carol sold for c.06 in the United States and the equivalent of $2.50 in England.17 Clearly, such a situation could lead to some rather difficult circumstances for authors. American publishers had little inducement to publish “original native works” because a copyright had to be paid to their authors. The American author was largely left, then, unable to earn his or her living as a fiction writer because he or she was excluded from the fiction market. This also had an impact on the very content of writing as well. Dis­ couraged from dealing with subjects already treated in the cheaper editions of Euro­ pean works, American authors often had to stake out a different terrain, areas that were unusual but would still have enough market appeal to convince publishers to publish them.18 These influences did not constitute a new phenomenon. In fact, the growth of par­ ticular genres and styles of books themselves has been linked closely to similar social forces operating earlier. As Ian Watt and Raymond Williams have argued, the rise of

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   157 something as common today as the novel is related to changes in political economies and class structures and to the growth of ideologies of individualism, among other things.19 In the eighteenth century in Europe, for instance, “the rapid expansion of a new audience for literature, the literate middle class, especially the leisured middle class women,” also led to novels focusing on “love and marriage, economic individu­ alism, the complexities of modern life, and the possibility of personal morality in a corrupting world.” The economic conditions of publishing also changed a good deal. A decline in patronage was accompanied by the growth of the bookseller who com­ bined publishing, printing, and selling. Authors were often paid by the page. The speed of writing and amount of pages written was of no small value, as one might imagine.20 These small examples give a sense of the historical complexity of the influences on publishing and on its content, readership, and economic realities. Book publishing today lives in the shadow of this past and the social, ideological, and economic con­ ditions that continued their development out of it. This is particularly the case in understanding the commercial and cultural structures involved in the publication of textbooks for schools. An excellent case in point is the production of texts for tertiary level courses. As we shall see, the “culture and commerce” of college-­text and other text production can provide some important insights into how the process of cultural commodification works.

II While we may think of book publishing as a relatively large industry, by current stand­ ards it is actually rather small compared with other industries. The entire book-­ publishing industry, with its 65,000 or so employees, would rank nearly forty to fifty positions below a single one of the highest grossing and largest employing American companies. While its total sales in 1980 were approximately six billion dollars and this does in fact sound impressive, in many ways its market is much less certain and is subject to greater economic, political, and ideological contingencies than other, larger companies. Six billion dollars, however, is still definitely not a pittance. Book publishing is an industry, one divided up into a variety of markets. Of the total, $1.2 billion was accounted for by reference books, encyclopedias, and professional books; $1.5 billion came from the elementary, secondary, and college-­text market; $1 billion was taken in from book clubs and direct mail sales; books intended for the general public—what are called trade books—had a sales level of $1 billion; and, finally, nearly $660 million was accounted for by mass-­market paperbacks. With its $1.5 billion sales, it is obvious that the textbook market is no small segment of the industry as a whole.21 The increasing concentration of power in text publishing has been marked. There has been more and more competition recently, but this has occurred among a smaller number of larger firms. The competition has also reduced the propensity to take risks. Instead, many publishers now prefer to expend most of their efforts on a smaller selec­ tion of “carefully chosen ‘products.’ ”22 Perhaps the simplest way to illuminate part of this dynamic is to quote from a major figure in publishing, who, after thirty-­five years of involvement in the industry,

158   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook reflected on the question, “How competitive is book publishing?” His answer, succinct and speaking paragraphs was only one word—”Very.”23 A picture of the nature of the concentration within text publishing can be gained from a few facts. Seventy-­five percent of the total sales of college text-­books was con­ trolled by the ten largest text publishers, with 90% accounted for by the top twenty. Prentice-­Hall, McGraw-­Hill, the CBS Publishing Group, and Scott, Foresman—the top four—accounted for 40% of the market.24 In what is called the “elhi” (elementary and high school) market, the figures are also very revealing. It is estimated that the four largest textbook publishers of these materials account for 32% of the market. The eight largest firms control 53%. And the twenty largest control over 75% of sales.25 This is no small amount, to be sure. Yet concentration does not tell the entire story. Internal fac­ tors—who works in these firms, what their backgrounds and characteristics are, and what their working conditions happen to be—also play a significant part. What kind of people make the decisions about college and other texts? Even though many people find their way into publishing in general by accident, as it were, this is even more the case for editors who work in firms that deal with, say, college texts. “Most of them entered publishing simply because they were looking for some sort of a job, and publishing presented itself.”26 But these people are not all equal. Important divisions exist within the houses themselves. In fact, one thing that recent research makes strikingly clear is the strength of sex-­ typing in the division of labor in publishing. Women are often found in subsidiary rights and publicity departments. They are often copy editors. While they outnumber men in employment within publishing as a whole, this does not mean that they are a powerful overt force. Rather, they largely tend to be hired as “secretaries, assistants, publicists, advertising managers, and occupants of other low- and mid-­level positions.” Even though there have been a number of women who have moved into important editorial positions in the past few years, by and large women are still not as evident in positions that actually “exercise control over the goals and policy of publishing.” In essence, there is something of a dual labor market in publishing. The lower-­paying, replaceable jobs, ones with less possibility for advancement, form the “female enclaves.”27 What does this mean for this particular discussion? Nearly seventy-­five percent of the editors in college-­text publishing either began their careers as sales personnel or held sales or marketing positions before being promoted to editor.28 As there are many fewer women than men who travel around selling college or other level texts or holding positions of authority within sales departments that could lead to upward mobility, this will have an interesting effect on the people who become editors and on the content of editorial decisions as well. These facts have important implications. Most editorial decisions dealing with which texts are to be published—that is, concerning that which within particular disciplines is to count as legitimate content which students are to receive as “official knowledge”—are made by individuals who have specific characteristics. The vast majority of these editors will be male, thereby reproducing patriarchal relations within the firm itself. Second, their general background will complement the existing market structure that dominates text production. Financial capital, short-­term perspectives, and high profit margins will be seen as major goals.29 A substantial cultural or educational vision and the concerns

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   159 associated with strategies based on symbolic capital will necessarily take a back seat, where they come into play at all. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell recognize the influence of profit, the power of what they call commerce, in text production. As they note about college-­text publishing, the major emphasis is on the production of books for introductory-­level courses that have high student enrollments. A good deal of attention is paid to the design of the book itself and to marketing strategies that will cause it to be used in these courses.30 Yet, unlike most other kinds of publishing, text publishers define their markets not in terms of the actual reader of the book but in terms of the teacher or professor.31 The pur­ chaser, the student, has little power in this equation, except where his or her views may influence a professor’s decision. Based on the sense of sales potential and on their “regular polling of their markets,” a large percentage of college-­text editors actively search for books. Contacts are made, suggestions given. In essence, it would not be wrong to say that text editors create their own books.32 This process is probably cheaper in the long run. In the United States, it is estimated that the production costs of an introductory text for a college-­level course is usually between $100,000 and $250,000. Given the fact that text publishers produce a relatively small number of books compared with large pub­ lishers of, say, fiction, there is considerable pressure on the editorial staff and others to guarantee that such books sell.33 For the “elhi” market, the sheer amount of money and risks involved are made visible by the fact that, nearly a decade ago, for every $500,000 invested by a publisher in a text, it had to sell 100,000 copies just to break even.34 Pub­ lishers of basal reading textbooks may perhaps play for the highest stakes here, as their start-up costs range from $10 million to $40 million. Such high costs give current basal publishers a virtual monopoly over the market.35 These conditions have an impact on the social relations within the firm besides that of the patriarchal structure noted earlier. Staff meetings, meetings with other editors, meetings with marketing and production staff to coordinate the production of a text, and so on—these kinds of activities tend to dominate the life of the text editor. As Coser and his coauthors so nicely phrase it, “text editors practically live in meetings.”36 Hence, text publishing will be much more bureaucratic and will have decision-­making structures that are more formalized. This is partly due to the fact that textbook produc­ tion is largely a routine process. Formats do not markedly differ from discipline to dis­ cipline. And, as I mentioned, the focus is primarily on producing a limited number of large sellers at a comparatively high price compared to fiction. Lastly, the emphasis is often on marketing a text with a standard content, a text that—with revisions and a little bit of luck—will be used for years to come.37 All of these elements are heightened even more in another aspect of text publishing that contributes to bureaucratization and standardization, the orchestrated production of “managed” texts. These volumes are usually written by professional writers, with some “guidance” from graduate students and academics, although such volumes often bear the name of a well-­known professor. Closely coordinated are text and graphics, language and reading levels, and the main text and an instructor’s manual. In many ways, these are books without formal authors. Ghostwritten under conditions of strin­ gent cost controls, geared to what will sell, not necessarily to what is most important to know, managed texts have been finding a place in many college classrooms. While the

160   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook dreams of some publishers that such texts will solve their financial problems have not been totally realized, the managed text is a significant phenomenon and deserves a good deal of critical attention not only at the college level but also in elementary and secondary schools, since the managed text is not at all absent in these areas, to say the least.38 Even with the difficulty some managed texts have had in making the anticipated high profits, there will probably be more centralized control over writing and over the entire process of publishing material for classroom use. The effect, according to Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, will be “an even greater homogenization of texts at a college level,”39 something we can expect at the elementary and high school level as well.40 In fact, even after reviewing different sets of basal series extensively for many weeks, teachers and administrators often find it very difficult to tell one set from another, because of the similarity of organization and content.41 These points demonstrate some of the important aspects of day-­to-day life within publishing. With all the meetings, the planning, growing sampling of markets, the competition, and so forth, one would expect that this would have a profound impact on the content of volumes. This is the case, but perhaps not quite in the way one might think. We need to be very careful here about assuming that there is simple and overt censorship of material. The process is much more complicated than that. Even though existing research does not go into detail about such things within the college-­text industry specifically, one can infer what happens from its discussion of censorship in the larger industry. In the increasingly conglomerate-­owned publishing field at large, censorship and ideological control as we commonly think of them are less of a problem than might be anticipated. It is not ideological uniformity or some political agenda that accounts for many of the ideas that are ultimately made or not made available to the larger public. Rather, it is the infamous “bottom line” that counts. As Coser, Kadushin, and Powell state: “Ultimately . . . if there is any censorship, it concerns profitability. Books that are not profitable, no matter what their subject, are not viewed favorably.”42 This is not an inconsequential concern. In the publishing industry as a whole, only three out of every ten books are marginally profitable; only thirty percent manage to break even. The rest lose money.43 Further, it has become clear that sales of textbooks in particular have actually been decreasing. If we take as a baseline the years of 1968 to, say, 1976, costs had risen considerably, but sales at a college level had fallen 10%. The same is true for the “elhi” text market; coupled with rising costs was a drop in sales of 11.2%44 (this may have changed for the better given recent sales figures). If we speak specifically of basal textbooks, beyond the leading five basal publishers, which control over eighty percent of the market,45 ten publishers compete for the remaining $8 million.46 With start-­up costs so high and with revision costs estimated at between $5 million to $8 million,47 issues of profit are in fact part of a national set of choices within corporate logic. If this is the case for publishing in general, and probably—in large part—for college­text production, is this case generalizable to those standardized secondary and, espe­ cially, elementary textbooks I pointed to earlier? Are market, profit, and internal relations more important than ideological concerns? Here we must answer: Only in part.

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   161 The economics and politics of elementary- and secondary-­school text production are somewhat more complicated. While there is no official federal government spon­ sorship of specific curriculum content in the United States (as there is in those coun­ tries where ministries of education mandate a standard course of study), the structures of a national curriculum are produced by the marketplace and by state intervention in other ways. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is to be found in the various models of state adoption now extant. As many know from personal experience, in quite a few states—most often in the southern tier around to the western sun-­belt—textbooks for use in the major subject areas must be approved by state agencies or committees, or they are reviewed and a limited number are selected as recommended for use in schools. If local school districts select material from such an approved list, they are often reimbursed for a significant portion of the purchase cost. Because of this, even where texts are not mandated, there is a good deal to be gained by local schools in a time of economic crisis if they do in fact ultimately choose an approved volume. The cost savings here, obviously, are not inconsequential. Yet it is not only here that the economics of cultural distribution operates. Publish­ ers themselves, simply because of good business practice, must by necessity aim their text-­publishing practices towards those states with such state adoption policies. The simple fact of getting one’s volume on such a list can mean all the difference in a text’s profitability. Thus, for instance, sales to California and Texas can account for over twenty percent of the total sales of any particular book—a considerable percentage in the highly competitive world of elementary- and secondary-­school book publishing and selling. Due to this, the writing, editing, promotion, and general orientation and strategy of such production is quite often aimed toward guaranteeing a place on the list of state-­approved material. Since this is the case, the political and ideological climate of these primarily southern states often determines the content and form of the pur­ chased curriculum throughout the rest of the nation. And since a textbook series often takes years to both write and produce and, as I noted earlier, can be very costly when production costs are totaled, “publishers want [the] assurance of knowing that their school book series will sell before they commit large budgets to these undertakings.”48 Yet even here the situation is complicated considerably, especially by the fact that agencies of the state apparatus are important sites of ideological struggle. These very conflicts may make it very difficult for publishers to determine a simple reading of the needs of “financial capital.” Often, for instance, given the uncertainty of a market, pub­ lishers may be loath to make decisions based on the political controversies or “needs” of any one state, especially in highly charged curriculum areas. A good example is pro­ vided by the California “creationism versus evolutionism” controversy, where a group of “scientific creationists” supported by the political and ideological Right, sought to make all social studies and science texts give equal weight to creationist and evolution­ ary theories. Even when California’s board of education, after much agonizing and debate, re­commended “editorial qualifications” that were supposed to meet the objections of crea­ tionist critics of the textbooks, the framework for text adoption was still very unclear and subject to many different interpretations. Did it require or merely allow discussion of ­creation theory? Was a series of editorial changes that qualified the discussions of

162   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook e­ volution in the existing texts all that was required? Given this ambiguity and the volatility of the issue in which the “winning position” was unclear, publishers “resisted undertaking the more substantial effort of incorporating new information into their materials.”49 In the words of one observer: “Faced with an unclear directive, and one that might be reversed at any moment, publishers were reluctant to invest in change. They eventually yielded to the minor editorial adjustments adopted by the board, but staunchly resisted the requirement that they discuss creation in their social science texts.”50 Both economic and ideological forces enter here in important ways, both between the firms and their markets and undoubtedly within the firms themselves. Notice what this means if we are to fully understand how specific cultural goods are produced and distributed for our public schools. We would need to unpack the logic of a fairly complicated set of interrelationships. How does the political economy of pub­ lishing itself generate particular economic and ideological needs? How and why do publishers respond to the needs of the “public?” Who determines what this “public” is?51 How do the internal politics of state adoption policies work? What are the proc­ esses of selecting people and interests to sit on such committees? How are texts sold at a local level? What is the actual process of text production from the commissioning of a project to revisions and editing to promotion and sales? How and for what reasons are decisions on this made? Only by going into considerable detail with each of these questions can we begin to see how a particular group’s cultural capital is commodified and made available (or not made available) in schools throughout the country.52 My discussion of the issues of state adoption policies and my raising of the ques­ tions above are not meant to imply that all of the material found in our public schools will be simply a reflection of existing cultural and economic inequalities. After all, if texts were totally reliable defenders of the existing ideological, political, and economic order, they would not be such a contentious area currently. Industry and conservative groups have made an issue of what knowledge is now taught in schools precisely because there are progressive elements within curricula and texts.53 This is partly due to the fact that the authorship of such material is often done by a particular segment of the new middle class, with its own largely liberal ideological interests, its own contra­ dictory consciousness, its own elements of what Gramsci might call good and bad sense, ones that will not be identical to those embodied in profit maximization or ideo­ logical uniformity. To speak theoretically, there will be relatively autonomous interests in specific cultural values within the groups of authors and editors who work for pub­ lishers. These values may be a bit more progressive than one might anticipate from the market structure of text production. This will surely work against total standardization and censorship.54 These kinds of issues—concerning who writes and edits texts, whether they are totally controlled by the complicated market relations and state policies surrounding text publishing, and what the contradictory forces are at work—all clearly need further elaboration. My basic aim has been to demonstrate how recent research on the ways in which culture is commodified can serve as a platform for thinking about some of our own dilemmas as teachers and researchers in education who are concerned with the dynamics of cultural capital.

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   163

III So far, I have employed some of the research on book publishing to help understand an issue that is of great import to educators—how and by whom the texts that domi­ nate the curriculum come to be the way they are. As I mentioned at the very outset of this chapter, however, we need to see such analyses as a serious contribution to a larger theoretical debate about cultural processes and products as well. In this concluding section, let me try to make this part of my argument about the political economy of culture clear. External economic and political pressures are not somewhere “out there” in some vague abstraction called the economy. As recent commentators have persuasively argued, in our society hegemonic forms are not often imposed from outside by a small group of corporate owners who sit around each day plotting how to “do in” workers, women, and people of color. Some of this plotting may go on, of course. But just as significant are the routine bases of our daily decisions, in our homes, stores, offices, and factories. To speak somewhat technically, dominant relations are reconstituted on an ongoing basis by the actions we take and the decisions we make in our own local and small areas of life. Rather than an economy being out there, it is right here. We rebuild it routinely in our social interaction. Rather than ideological domination and the relations of cultural capital being something that is imposed on us from above, we reintegrate them within our everyday discourse merely by following our commonsense needs and desires as we go about making a living, finding sustenance and entertain­ ment, and so on.55 These abstract arguments are important to the points I want to make. For while a serious theoretical structure is either absent or hidden within the data presented by the research I have drawn upon, a good deal of this research does document some of the claims made in these abstract arguments. As Coser, Kadushin, and Powell put it in their discussion of why particular decisions are made, For the most part, what directly affects an editor’s daily routine is not corporate ownership or being one division of a large multi-­divisional publishing house. Instead, on a day-­to-day basis, editorial behavior is most strongly influenced by the editorial policies of the house and the relationship among departments and personnel within the publishing house or division.56 This position may not seem overly consequential, yet its theoretic import is great. Encapsulated within a changing set of market relations that set limits on what is con­ sidered rational behavior on the part of its participants, editors and other employees have “relative autonomy.” They are partly free to pursue the internal needs of their craft and to follow the logic of the internal demands within the publishing house itself. The past histories of gender, class, and race relations, and the actual “local” political economy of publishing, set the boundaries within which these decisions are made and in large part determine who will make the decisions. To return to my earlier point about text editors usually having their roots in the sales department, we can see that the internal labor market in text publishing, the ladder upon which career mobility depends, means that in these firms, sales will be in the forefront ideologically and

164   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook e­ conomically. “Finance capital” dominates, not only because the economy out there mandates it, but because of the historical connections among mobility patterns within firms, because of rational decision making based on external competition, political dynamics, and internal information, and thus because of the kinds of discourse that tend to dominate the meetings and conversations among all the people involved within the organizational structure of the text publisher.57 This kind of analysis makes it more complicated, or course. But surely it is more elegant and more grounded in reality than some of the more mechanistic theories about the economic control of culture, theories that have been a bit too readily accepted. This analysis manages to preserve the efficacy of the economy while granting some autonomy to the internal bureaucratic and bio­ graphical structure of individual publishers, and at the same time recognizes the polit­ ical economy of gendered labor that exists as well. Many areas remain that I have not focused upon here, of course. Among the most important of these is the alteration in the very technology of publishing. Just as the development and use of print “made possible the growth of literary learning and jour­ nals” and thereby helped to create the conditions for individual writers and artists to emerge out of the more collective conditions of production that dominated guilds and workshops,58 so too would one expect that the changes in the technology of text pro­ duction and the altered social and authorial relations that are evolving from them will have a serious impact on books. At the very least, given the sexual division of labor in publishing, new technologies can have a large bearing on the de-­skilling and re-­skilling of those “female enclaves” I mentioned earlier.59 Further, even though I have directed my attention primarily to the “culture and commerce” surrounding the production of one particular cultural commodity—the standarized text used for tertiary- and elhi-­level courses—it still remains an open ques­ tion as to exactly how the economic and ideological elements I have outlined work through some of the largest of all text markets, those for the elementary and secondary schools. However, in order to go significantly further we clearly need a more adequate theory of the relationship between the political and economic (to say nothing of the cultural) spheres in education. Thus, the state’s position as a site for class, race, and gender conflicts, how these struggles are “resolved” within the state apparatus, how publishers respond to these conflicts and resolutions, and ultimately what impact these resolutions or accords have on the questions surrounding officially sponsored texts and knowledge—all of these need considerably more deliberation.60 The recent work of Carnoy and Dale on the interrelations between education and the state, and Offe’s analyses of the state’s role in negative selection, may provide important avenues of investigation here.61 This points to a significant empirical agenda, as well. What is required now is a long-­term and theoretically and politically grounded ethnographic investigation to follow a curriculum artifact such as a textbook from its writing to its selling (and then to its use). Not only would this be a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship among culture, politics, and economy, it is also absolutely essential if we are to act in ways that alter the kinds of knowledge considered legitimate for transmis­ sion in our schools.62 As long as the text dominates curricula, to ignore it as simply not worthy of serious attention and serious struggle is to live in a world divorced from reality.

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   165

Notes This chapter is an updated version of one that appeared under the same name as Chapter 4 in my Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York: Routledge, 1988).   1. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.  19. See also, Michael W. Apple and Lois Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), especially chap. 1.   2. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 47.   3. I have described this in more detail in Michael W. Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education: Essays on Class, Ideology and the State (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). For further analysis of this, see Williams, Marxism and Literature; Colin Sumner, Reading Ideologies (New York: Macmillan, 1979); G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1979).   4. See Todd Gitlin, “Television’s Screens: Hegemony in Transition,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education. The British journal Screen has been in the forefront of such analyses. See also, Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1975). An even greater number of investigations of literature exist, of course. For representative approaches, see Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berke­ ley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1976).   5. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, 2d ed. (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990). It is important to realize, however, that educational institutions are not merely engaged in transmission or distribution. They are also primary sites for the production of technical/administrative knowledge. The contradiction between distribution and production is one of the constitutive tensions educational institutions try to solve, usually unsuccess­ fully. For arguments about the school’s role in the production of cultural capital, see Michael W. Apple, Education and Power, revised ARK Edition (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), especially chap. 2.   6. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-­Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977), and Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).   7. For an analysis of recent theoretical and empirical work on the connections between educa­ tion and cultural, economic, and political power, see Apple, Education and Power.   8. Paul Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook (Lexington, Mass.: D.  C. Heath, 1978), p.  1. On which subjects are taught the most, see John I. Goodland, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1983).   9. I do not want to ignore the importance of the massive number of textbook analyses that concern themselves with, say, racism and sexism. Although significant, these are usually limited to the question of balance in content, not the relationship between economic and cultural power. Some of the best analyses of the content and form of educational materials can be found in Apple and Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling. See also Sherry Keith, “Politics of Textbook Selection,” Institute for Research on Educational Finance and Governance, Stanford University, April 1981. Among the best recent critical studies of text­ books are Allan Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology (Philadelphia: Falmer Press, 1988), and Patrick Shannon, Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth Century America (Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1989). 10. Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 3. 11. Ibid., p. 7. 12. Lucien Febvre and Henri-­Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 109. As Febvre and Martin make clear, however, in the fifteen and sixteenth centu­ ries printers and publishers also acted as “the protectors of literary men,” published daring books, and frequently sheltered authors accused of heresy. See p. 150.

166   The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 44. 15. Ibid., p. 54. 16. Wendy Griswold, “American Character and the American Novel: An Expansion of Reflec­ tion Theory in the Sociology of Literature,” American Journal of Sociology 86 (January 1981): 742. 17. Ibid., p. 748. 18. Ibid., pp. 748–749. 19. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1974), and Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961). 20. Griswold, “American Character and the American Novel,” p. 743. 21. Leonard Shatzkin, In Cold Type (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1982), pp.  1–2. For esti­ mated figures for the years after 1980, see John P. Dessauer, Book Industry Trends, 1982 (New York: Book Industry Study Group, Inc., 1982). 22. Coser, Kadushin and Powell, Books, p.  273. While I shall be focusing on text production here, we should not assume that texts are the only books used in elementary, secondary, and college markets. The expanding market of other material can have a strong influence in pub­ lishing decisions. In fact, some mass-­market paperbacks are clearly prepared with both school and college sales in the forefront of their decisions. Thus, it is not unusual for publish­ ers to produce a volume with very different covers depending on the audience for which it is aimed. See Benjamin M. Compaine, The Book Industry in Transition: An Economic Study of Book Distribution and Marketing (White Plains, N.Y.: Knowledge Industry Publications, 1978), p. 95. 23. Shatzkin, In Cold Type, p. 63. 24. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 273. 25. Goldstein, Changing The American Schoolbook, p. 61. 26. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 100. 27. Ibid., pp. 154–155. 28. Ibid., p. 101. 29. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, however, do report that most editors, no matter what kind of house they work for, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. Ibid., p. 113. 30. Ibid., p. 30. 31. Ibid., p. 56. 32. Ibid., p. 135. 33. Ibid., pp. 56–57. 34. Goldstein, Changing The American Schoolbook, p. 56. 35. Kenneth Goodman et al., Report Card on Basal Readers (Katonah, N.Y.: Richard C. Owen, 1988), pp. 45–50. 36. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 123. 37. Ibid., p. 190. 38. Keith, “Politics of Textbook Selection,” p. 12. 39. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 366. 40. I have discussed this at greater length in Michael W. Apple, “Curriculum in the Year 2000: Tensions and Possibilities,” Phi Delta Kappan 64 (January 1983): 321–326. 41. Roger Farr, Michael Tully, and Deborah Powell, “The Evaluation and Selection of Basal Readers,” Elementary School Journal 87 (January 1987): 267–281. 42. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 181. 43. Compaine, The Book Industry in Transition, p. 20. 44. Ibid., pp. 33–34. 45. Goodman et al., Report Card on Basal Readers. 46. R. Auckerman, The Basal Reading Approach to Reading (New York: John Wiley, 1987). 47. James Squire, “A Response to the Report Card on Basal Readers,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Los Angeles, California, November 1987. 48. Keith, “Politics of Textbook Selection,” p. 8.

The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook   167 49. Goldstein, Changing the American Schoolbook, p. 47. 50. Ibid., pp. 48–49. 51. For an interesting discussion of how economic needs help determine what counts as the public for which a specific cultural product is intended, see the treatment of changes in the radio sponsorship of country music in Richard A. Peterson, “The Production of Cultural Change: The Case of Contemporary Country Music,” Social Research 45 (Summer 1978): 292–314. See also Paul Di Maggio and Michael Unseem, “The Arts in Class Reproduction,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, pp. 181–201. 52. I have discussed the relationship between the commodification process and the dynamics of cultural capital at greater length in Apple, Education and Power. 53. Ibid., especially chap. 5. 54. A related argument is made in Douglas Kellner, “Network Television and American Society,” Theory and Society 10 (January 1981): 31–62. See also Philip Wexler, “Structure, Text and Subject: A Critical Sociology of School Knowledge,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, pp. 275–303. 55. This is discussed in greater detail in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education. 56. Coser, Kadushin, and Powell, Books, p. 185. 57. Wexler’s argument that texts need to be seen as the result of a long process of transformative activity is clearly related here. In essence, what I have been attempting to demonstrate is part of the structure in which such transformations occur and which makes some more likely to occur than others. See Wexler, “Structure, Text and Subject,” and Philip Wexler, Social Analysis and Education (New York: Routledge, 1987). 58. Wolff, The Social Production of Art, p. 36. 59. The relationship among de-­skilling, re-­skilling, and the sexual division of labor is treated in more depth in Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts (New York: Routledge, 1988). See also David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (New York: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1982). 60. See, for example, Apple, Education and Power; Roger Dale, Geoff Esland, Ross Furguson, and Madeleine MacDonald, eds., Education and the State, vol. 1 (Barcombe, England: The Falmer Press, 1981); Michael W. Apple, “Common Curriculum and State Control,” Discourse 2, no. 4 (1982): 1–10; and Michael W. Apple, “Social Crisis and Curriculum Accords,” Educational Theory 38 (Spring 1988): 191–201. 61. I am indebted to Dan Liston for documenting the possible power of Offe’s work. See Daniel Liston, Capitalist Schools (New York: Routledge, 1989); Martin Carnoy, “Education, Economy and the State,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, pp. 79–126; Roger Dale, “Education and The Capitalist State: Contributions and Contradic­ tions,” in Apple, ed., Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education, pp.  127–161; and Roger Dale, The State and Education Policy (Bristol, Pa.: The Open University Press, 1989). 62. I do not want to imply that what is “transmitted” in schools is necessarily what is in the text. Nor do I want at all to claim that what is taught is wholly “taken in” by students. For analyses of teacher and student rejection, mediation, or transformation of the form and/or content of curriculum, see Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead, England: Saxon House, 1977); Robert Everhart, Reading, Writing and Resistance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts; and the chapters by Linda McNeil, Andrew Gitlin, and Lois Weis, in Apple and Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling.

9 Cultural Politics and the Text

Introduction1 For most people, literacy has a nonpolitical function. It is there supposedly to help form the intellectual character of a person and to provide paths to upward mobility. Yet, the process of both defining what counts as literacy and how it should be gained has always had links to particular regimes of morality as well. Literacy was often there to produce economic skills and a shared system of beliefs and values, to help create a “national culture.” As the author of a recent volume on newly emerging redefinitions of literacy in education has put it, it served as something of a “moral technology of the soul.”2 An emphasis on literacy as both “moral technology” and economically driven skills is of course not the only way one could and should approach the issue, no matter what the Right keeps telling us. The value of writing, speaking, and listening should not be seen as access to “refined culture” or to “life skills” for our allotted (by whom?) places in the paid and unpaid labor market, but as a crucial means to gain power and control over our entire lives. In responding to the dangers posed by the conservative restora­ tion, I argued that our aim should not be to create “functional literacy,” but critical lit­ eracy, powerful literacy, political literacy which enables the growth of genuine understanding and control of all of the spheres of social life in which we participate.3 This involves a different vision of knowledge and culture. Neither of these concepts refers to a false universality, a pregiven consensus that is divorced from patterns of domination and exploitation. Rather they refer to the utterly complex struggles over who has the right to “name the world.” Take the word “culture.” Culture—the way of life of a people, the constant and complex process by which meanings are made and shared—does not grow out of the pregiven unity of a society. Rather, in many ways, it grows out of its divisions. It has to work to construct any unity that it has. The idea of culture should not be used to “cel­ ebrate an achieved or natural harmony.” Culture is instead “a producer and reproducer of value systems and power relations.”4 The same is true for the way we think about knowledge. Speaking theoretically, John Fiske reminds us of this: Knowledge is never neutral, it never exists in an empiricist, objective relationship to the real. Knowledge is power, and the circulation of knowledge is part of the

Cultural Politics and the Text   169 social distribution of power. The discursive power to construct a commonsense reality that can be inserted into cultural and political life is central in the social relationship of power. The power of knowledge has to struggle to exert itself in two dimensions. The first is to control the “real,” to reduce reality to the knowable, which entails producing it as a discursive construct whose arbitrariness and ­inadequacy are disguised as far as possible. The second struggle is to have this ­discursively (and therefore sociopolitically) constructed reality accepted as truth by those whose interests may not necessarily be served by accepting it. Discursive power involves a struggle both to construct (a sense of ) reality and to circulate that reality as widely and smoothly as possible throughout society.5 Fiske’s language may perhaps be a bit too abstract here, but his points are essential. They point to the relationship among what counts as knowledge, who has power and how power actually functions in our daily lives, and, finally, how this determines what we see as “real” and important in our institutions in general and in education in par­ ticular. In this chapter, I focus on one particular aspect of education that helps define what “reality” is and how it is connected to critical, powerful, and political literacy in contradictory ways, ways the Right has recognized for years.

Whose Knowledge is of Most Worth? Reality, then, doesn’t stalk around with a label. What something is, what it does, one’s evaluation of it—all this is not naturally preordained. It is socially constructed. This is the case even when we talk about the institutions that organize a good deal of our lives. Take schools, for example. For some groups of people, schooling is seen as a vast engine of democracy: opening horizons, ensuring mobility, and so on. For others, the reality of schooling is strikingly different. It is seen as a form of social control, or, perhaps, as the embodiment of cultural dangers, institutions whose cur­ ricula and teaching practices threaten the moral universe of the students who attend them. While not all of us may agree with this diagnosis of what schools do, this latter posi­ tion contains a very important insight. It recognizes that behind Spencer’s famous question about “What knowledge is of most worth?” there lies another even more con­ tentious question, “Whose knowledge is of most worth?” During the past two decades, a good deal of progress has been made on answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools.6 While much still remains to be understood, we are now much closer to having an adequate understanding of the relationship between school knowledge and the larger society than before. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one artifact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught: the textbook. Of course, there have been literally thousands of studies of textbooks over the years.7 But, by and large, until relatively recently, most of these remained unconcerned with the politics of culture. All too many researchers could still be characterized by the phrase coined years ago by C. Wright Mills, “abstract empiricists.” These “hunters and gatherers of social numbers” remain unconnected to the relations of inequality that surround them.8

170   Cultural Politics and the Text This is a distinct problem since, as the rightist coalition has decisively shown by their repeated focus on them, texts are not simply “delivery systems” of “facts.” They are at once the results of political, economic, and cultural activities, battles, and com­ promises. They are conceived, designed, and authored by real people with real inter­ ests. They are published within the political and economic constraints of markets, resources, and power.9 And what texts mean and how they are used are fought over by communities with distinctly different commitments and by teachers and students as well. As I have argued in a series of volumes, it is naive to think of the school curriculum as neutral knowledge.10 Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender, and reli­ gious groups. Thus, education and power are terms of an indissoluble couplet. It is at times of social upheaval that this relationship between education and power becomes most visible. Such a relationship was and continues to be made manifest in the strug­ gles by women, people of color, and others to have their history and knowledge included in the curriculum. Driven by an economic crisis and a crisis in ideology and authority relations, it has become even more visible in the past decade or so in the resurgent conservative attacks on schooling. Authoritarian populism is in the air, and the New Right has been more than a little successful in bringing its own power to bear on the goals, content, and process of schooling.11 As I noted in chapter one, the movement to the right has not stopped outside the schoolroom door, as you well know. Current plans for the centralization of authority over teaching and curriculum, often cleverly disguised as “democratic” reforms, are hardly off the drawing board before new management proposals or privatization initi­ atives are introduced. Similar tendencies are more than a little evident in Britain, and in some cases are even more advanced. I showed that all of this has brought about countervailing movements in the schools. The slower, but still interesting, growth of more democratically run schools, of prac­ tices and policies that give community groups and teachers considerably more author­ ity in text selection and curriculum determination, in teaching strategy, in the use of funds, in administration, and in developing more flexible and less authoritarian evalu­ ation schemes is providing some cause for optimism in the midst of the conservative restoration. Even with these positive signs, however, it is clear that the New Right has been able to rearticulate traditional political and cultural themes. In so doing, it has often effect­ ively mobilized a mass base of adherents. Among its most powerful causes and effects has been the growing feeling of disaffection about public schooling among conservative groups. Large numbers of parents and other people no longer trust either the institu­ tions or the teachers and administrators in them to make “correct” decisions about what should be taught and how to teach it. The rapid growth of evangelical schooling, of censorship, of textbook controversies, and the emerging tendency of many parents to teach their children at home rather than send them to state-­supported schools are clear indications of this loss of legitimacy.12 As we saw, the ideology that stands behind this is often very complex. It combines a commitment to both the “traditional family” and clear gender roles with a commit­ ment to “traditional values” and literal religiosity. Also often packed into this is a

Cultural Politics and the Text   171 defense of capitalist economics, patriotism, the “Western tradition,” anticommunism, and a deep mistrust (often based on racial undercurrents) of the “welfare state.”13 When this ideology is applied to schooling, the result can be as simple as dissatisfac­ tion with an occasional book or assignment. On the other hand, the result can be a major conflict that threatens to go well beyond the boundaries of our usual debates about schooling. Few places in the United States are more well known in this latter context than Kanawha County, West Virginia. In the mid-­1970s, it became the scene of one of the most explosive controversies over what schools should teach, who should decide, and what beliefs should guide our educational programs. What began as a protest by a small group of conservative parents, religious leaders, and business people over the content and design of the textbooks that had been approved for use in local schools, soon spread to include school boycotts, violence, and a wrenching split within the community that in many ways has yet to heal. There were a number of important contributing factors that heightened tensions in West Virginia. Schools in rural areas had been recently consolidated. Class relations and country/city relations were increasingly tense. The lack of participation by rural parents (or many parents at all, for that matter) in text selection or in educational de­ cision making in general also led to increasing alienation. Furthermore, the cultural history of the region, with its fierce independence, its fundamentalist religious tradi­ tions, and its history of economic depression, helped create conditions for serious unrest. Finally, Kanawha County became a cause celebre for national right-­wing groups who offered moral, legal, and organizational support to the conservative activ­ ists there.14 Though perhaps less violent, many similar situations have occurred since then in a number of districts throughout the country. For instance, the recent experiences in Yucaipa, California—where the school system and largely conservative and fundamen­ talist protesters have been locked in what at times seemed to be a nearly explosive situ­ ation—document the continuing conflict over what schools are for and whose values should be embodied in them. Here, too, parents and community members have raised serious challenges over texts and over cultural authority, including attacks on the ma­ terial for witchcraft and occultism, a lack of patriotism, and the destruction of sacred knowledge and authority. And here, too, nationally based conservative organizations have entered the fray. It is important to realize, then, that controversies over “official knowledge” that usually center around what is included and excluded in textbooks really signify more profound political, economic, and cultural relations and histories. Conflicts over texts are often proxies for wider questions of power relations. They involve what people hold most dear. And, as in the cases of Kanawha County and Yucaipa, they can quickly escalate into conflicts over these deeper issues. Yet, textbooks are surely important in and of themselves. They signify, through their content and form, particular constructions of reality, particular ways of selecting and organizing that vast universe of possible knowledge. They embody what Raymond Wil­ liams called the selective tradition: someone’s selection, someone’s vision of legitimate knowledge and culture, one that in the process of enfranchising one group’s cultural capital disenfranchises another’s.15

172   Cultural Politics and the Text Texts are really messages to and about the future. As part of a curriculum, they participate in no less than the organized knowledge system of society. They participate in creating what a society has recognized as legitimate and truthful. They help set the canons of truthfulness and, as such, also help recreate a major reference point for what knowledge, culture, belief, and morality really are.16 Yet such a statement, even with its recognition that texts participate in constructing ideologies and ontologies, is basically misleading in many important ways. For it is not a “society” that has created such texts, but specific groups of people. “We” haven’t built such curriculum artifacts in the simple sense that there is universal agreement among all of us and this is what gets to be official knowledge. In fact, the very use of the pronoun “we” simplifies matters all too much. As Fred Inglis so cogently argues, the pronoun “we” smooths over the deep corrugations and ruptures caused precisely by struggle over how that authoritative and editorial “we” is going to be used. The [text], it is not melodramatic to declare, really is the battleground for an intellectual civil war, and the battle for cultural authority is a wayward, intermittingly fierce, always pro­ tracted and fervent one.17 Let me give one example. In the 1930s, conservative groups in the United States mounted a campaign against one of the more progressive textbook series in use in schools. Man and His Changing World by Harold Rugg and his colleagues became the subject of a concerted attack by the National Association of Manufacturers, the Amer­ ican Legion, the Advertising Federation of America, and other “neutral” groups. They charged that Rugg’s books were socialist, anti-­American, antibusiness, and so forth. The conservative campaign was more than a little successful in forcing school districts to withdraw Rugg’s series from classrooms and libraries. So successful were they that sales fell from nearly 300,000 copies in 1938 to only approximately 20,000 in 1944.18 We, of course, may have reservations about such texts today, not least of which would be the sexist title. However, one thing that the Rugg case makes clear is that the politics of the textbook is not something new by any means. Current issues sur­ rounding texts—their ideology, their very status as central definers of what we should teach, even their very effectiveness and their design—echo the past moments of these concerns that have had such a long history in so many countries. Few aspects of schooling currently have been subject to more intense scrutiny and criticism than the text. Perhaps one of the most graphic descriptions is provided by A. Graham Down of the Council for Basic Education. Textbooks, for better or worse, dominate what students learn. They set the curric­ ulum, and often the facts learned, in most subjects. For many students, textbooks are their first and sometimes only early exposure to books and to reading. The public regards textbooks as authoritative, accurate, and necessary. And teachers rely on them to organize lessons and structure subject matter. But the current system of textbook adoption has filled our schools with Trojan horses—glossily covered blocks of paper whose words emerge to deaden the minds of our nation’s youth, and make them enemies of learning.19

Cultural Politics and the Text   173 This statement is made just as powerfully by the author of a recent study of what she has called “America’s textbook fiasco.” Imagine a public policy system that is perfectly designed to produce textbooks that confuse, mislead, and profoundly bore students, while at the same time making all of the adults involved in the process look good, not only in their own eyes, but in the eyes of others. Although there are some good textbooks on the market, pub­ lishers and editors are virtually compelled by public policies and practices to create textbooks that confuse students with non sequiturs, that mislead them with misin­ formation, and that profoundly bore them with pointlessly arid writing.20

Regulation or Liberation and the Text In order to understand these criticisms and to understand both some of the reasons why texts look the way they do and why they contain some groups’ perspectives and not others’, we also need to realize that the world of the book has not been cut off from the world of commerce. Books are not only cultural artifacts. They are economic com­ modities as well. Even though texts may be vehicles of ideas, they still have to be “peddled on a market.”21 This is a market, however, that—especially in the national and international world of textbook publishing—is politically volatile, as the Kanawha County and Yucaipa experiences so clearly documented. Texts are caught up in a complicated set of political and economic dynamics. Text publishing often is highly competitive. In the United States, where text production is a commercial enterprise situated within the vicissitudes of a capitalist market, decisions about the “bottom line” determine what books are published and for how long. Yet, this situation is not just controlled by the “invisible hand” of the market. It is also largely determined by the highly visible “political” hand of state textbook adoption policies.22 Nearly half of the states—most of them in the southern tier and the “sun belt”— have state textbook adoption committees that by and large choose what texts will be purchased by the schools in that state, a process that is itself contradictory in its history. As I shall demonstrate in the next chapter, it too has signified losses and gains at the same time. The economics of profit and loss of this situation makes it imperative that publishers devote nearly all of their efforts to guaranteeing a place on these lists of approved texts. Because of this, the texts made available to the entire nation, and the knowledge considered legitimate in them, are determined by what will sell in Texas, California, Florida, and so forth. This is one of the major reasons the Right concen­ trates its attention so heavily on these states (though, because of resistance, with only partial success). There can be no doubt that the political and ideological controversies over content in these states, controversies that were often very similar to those that surfaced in Kanawha County, have had a very real impact on what and whose know­ ledge is made available. It is also clear that Kanawha County was affected by and had an impact on these larger battles over legitimate knowledge. Economic and political realities structure text publishing not only internally, however. On an international level, the major text-­publishing conglomerates control the market of much of the material not only in the capitalist centers, but in many other

174   Cultural Politics and the Text nations as well. Cultural domination is a fact of life for millions of students throughout the world, in part because of the economic control of communication and publishing by multinational firms, in part because of the ideologies and systems of political and cultural control of new elites within former colonial countries.23 All of this, too, has led to complicated relations and struggles over official knowledge and the text, between “center” and “periphery,” and within these areas as well.24 Thus, the politics of official knowledge in Britain and the United States, where rightist policies over legitimate content are having a major impact, also can have a significant impact in other nations that also depend on British and U.S. corporate publishers for their material. I want to stress that all of this is not simply of historical interest, as in the case of newly emerging nations, Kanawha County, or the Rugg textbooks. The controversies over the form and content of the textbook have not diminished. In fact, they have become even more heated in the United States in particular, as Yucaipa demonstrates. The changing ideological climate has had a major impact on debates over what should be taught in schools and on how it should be taught and evaluated. There is consider­ able pressure to raise the standards of texts, make them more “difficult,” standardize their content, make certain that the texts place more stress on “American” themes of patriotism, free enterprise, and the “Western tradition,” and link their content to statewide and national tests of educational achievement. These kinds of pressures are not only felt in the United States. The text has become the center of ideological and educational conflict in a number of other countries as well. In Japan, for instance, the government approval of a right-­wing history textbook that retold the story of the brutal Japanese invasion and occupation of China and Korea in a more positive light has stimulated widespread international antagonism and has led to considerable controversy within Japan as well. Along these same lines, at the very time that the text has become a source of conten­ tion for conservative movements, it has stood at the center of controversy for not being progressive enough. Class, gender, and race bias have been widespread in the mater­ ials. All too often, “legitimate” knowledge does not include the historical experiences and cultural expressions of labor, women, people of color, and others who have been less powerful.25 All of these controversies are not “simply” about the content of the books students find—or don’t find—in their schools, though obviously they are about that as well. The issues are also about profoundly different definitions of the common good,26 about our society and where it should be heading, about cultural visions, and about our children’s future. To quote from Inglis again, the entire curriculum, in which the text plays so large a part, is “both the text and context in which production and values intersect; it is the twist-­point of imagination and power.”27 In the context of the politics of the text­ book, it is the issue of power that should concern us the most. The concept of power merely connotes the capacity to act and to do so effectively. However, in the ways we use the idea of power in our daily discourse, “the word comes on strongly and menacingly, and its presence is duly fearful.”28 This “dark side” of power is, of course, complemented by a more positive vision. Here, power is seen as connected to a people acting democratically and collectively, in the open, for the best ideals.29 It is this dual concept of power that concerns me here, both at the level of theory (how we think about the relationship between legitimate knowledge and power)

Cultural Politics and the Text   175 and practice (how texts actually embody this relationship). Both the positive and the negative senses of power are essential for us to understand these relationships. Taken together, they signify that arguments about textbooks are really a form of cultural politics. They involve the very nature of the connections between cultural visions and dif­ ferential power. This, of course, is not new to anyone who has been interested in the history of the rela­ tionship among books, literacy, and popular movements. Books themselves, and one’s ability to read them, have been inherently caught up in cultural politics. Take the case of Voltaire, that leader of the Enlightenment who so wanted to become a member of the nobility. For him, the Enlightenment should begin with the “grands.” Only when it had captured the hearts and minds of society’s commanding heights, could it concern itself with the masses below. But, for Voltaire and many of his followers, one caution should be taken very seriously. One should take care to prevent the masses from learning to read.30 For others, teaching “the masses” to read could have a more “beneficial” effect. It enables a “civilizing” process, in which dominated groups would be made more moral, more obedient, more influenced by “real culture.”31 We can, of course, hear echoes of this today in the arguments of the cultural conservatives. And for still others, such lit­ eracy could bring social transformation in its wake. It could lead to a “critical literacy,” one that would be part of larger movements for a more democratic culture, economy, and polity.32 The dual sense of the power of the text emerges clearly here. Thus, activities that we now ask students to engage in every day, activities as “simple” and basic as reading and writing, can be at one and the same time forms of regulation and exploitation and potential modes of resistance, celebration, and solid­ arity. Here, I am reminded of Caliban’s cry, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”33 This contradictory sense of the politics of the book is made clearer if we go into the classrooms of the past. For example, texts often have been related to forms of bureau­ cratic regulation both of teachers’ lives and those of students. Thus, one teacher in Boston in 1899 relates a story of what happened during an observation by the school principal in her first year of teaching. As the teacher rather proudly watched one of her children read aloud an assigned lesson from the text, the principal was less than pleased with the performance of the teacher or her pupil. In the words of the teacher: The proper way to read in the public school in 1899 was to say, “page 35, chapter 4” and holding the book in the right hand, with the toes pointing at an angle of forty-­five degrees, the head held straight and high, the eyes looking directly ahead, the pupil would lift up his voice and struggle in loud, unnatural tones. Now, I had attended to the position of the toes, the right arm, and the nose, but had failed to enforce the mentioning of page and chapter.34 Here, the text participates in both bodily and ideological regulation. The textbook in this instance is part of a system of enforcing a sense of duty, morality, and cultural cor­ rectness. Yet, historically, the standardized text was struggled for as well as against by many teachers. Faced with large classes, difficult working conditions, insufficient train­ ing, and even more importantly, little time to prepare lessons for the vast array of ­subjects and students they were responsible for, teachers often looked upon texts not

176   Cultural Politics and the Text necessarily as impositions but as essential tools. For young women elementary school teachers, the text helped prevent exploitation.35 It solved a multitude of practical prob­ lems. It led not only to deskilling, but led to time to become more skilled as a teacher as well.36 Thus, there were demands for standardized texts by teachers even in the face of what happened to that teacher in Boston and to so many others. This struggle over texts was linked to broader concerns about who should control the curriculum in schools. Teachers, especially those most politically active, constantly sought to have a say in what they taught. This was seen as part of a larger fight for democratic rights. Margaret Haley, for instance, one of the leaders of the first teachers union in the United States, saw a great need for teachers to work against the tendency toward making the teacher “a mere factory hand, whose duty it is to carry out mechan­ ically and unquestioningly the ideas and orders of those clothed with authority of posi­ tion.”37 Teachers had to fight against the deskilling or, as she called it, “factoryizing” methods of control being sponsored by administrative and industrial leaders. One of the reasons she was so strongly in favor of teachers’ councils as mechanisms of control of schools was that this would reduce considerably the immense power over teaching and texts that administrators then possessed. Quoting John Dewey approvingly, Haley wrote, “If there is a single public-­school system in the United States where there is offi­ cial and constitutional provision made for submitting questions of methods, of discip­ line and teaching, and the questions of curriculum, textbooks, etc. to the discussion of those actually engaged in the work of teaching, that fact has escaped my notice.”38 In this instance, teacher control over the choice of textbooks and how they were to be used was part of a more extensive movement to enhance the democratic rights of teachers on the job. Without such teacher control, teachers would be the equivalent of factory workers whose every move was determined by management. These points about the contradictory relationships teachers have had with texts and the way such books depower and empower at different moments (and perhaps at the same time) document something of importance. It is too easy to see a cultural practice or a book as totally carrying its politics around with it, “as if written on its brow for ever and a day.” Rather, its political functioning “depends on the network of social and ideological relations” it participates in.39 Text writing, reading, and use can be retro­ gressive or progressive (and sometimes some combination of both) depending on the social context. Textbooks can be fought against because they are part of a system of moral regulation. They can be fought for both as providing essential assistance in the labor of teaching or as part of a larger strategy of democratization. What textbooks do, the social roles they play for different groups, is then very complicated. This has important implications not only for the politics of how and by whom textbooks are used, but for the politics of the internal qualities, the content and organ­ ization, of the text. Just as crucially, it also has an immense bearing on how people actually read and interpret the text, especially in a time of rightist resurgence. It is to these issues that I now turn.

The Politics of Cultural Incorporation We cannot assume that because so much of education has been linked to processes of gender, class, and race stratification40 that all of the knowledge chosen to be included

Cultural Politics and the Text   177 in texts simply represents relations of, say, cultural domination, or only includes the knowledge of dominant groups. This point requires that I speak theoretically and polit­ ically in this section of my argument, for all too many critical analyses of school know­ ledge—of what is included and excluded in the overt and hidden curricula of the school—take the easy way out. Reductive analysis comes cheap. Reality, however, is complex. Let us look at this in more detail. It has been argued in considerable detail elsewhere that the selection and organiza­ tion of knowledge for schools is an ideological process, one that serves the interests of particular classes and social groups.41 However, as I just noted, this does not mean that the entire corpus of school knowledge is “a mirror reflection of ruling class ideas, imposed in an unmediated and coercive manner.” Instead, “the processes of cultural incorporation are dynamic, reflecting both continuities and contradictions of that dominant culture and the continual remaking and relegitimation of that culture’s plau­ sibility system.”42 Curricula aren’t imposed in countries like the United States. Rather, they are the products of often intense conflicts, negotiations, and attempts at rebuild­ ing hegemonic control by actually incorporating the knowledge and perspectives of the less powerful under the umbrella of the discourse of dominant groups. This is clear in the case of the textbook. As disenfranchised groups have fought to have their knowledge take center stage in the debates over cultural legitimacy, one trend has dominated in text production. In essence, little is usually dropped from text­ books. Major ideological frameworks do not get markedly changed. Textbook publish­ ers are under considerable and constant pressure to include more in their books. Progressive items are perhaps mentioned, then, but are not developed in depth.43 Dom­ inance is partly maintained here through compromise and the process of “mention­ ing.” Here, limited and isolated elements of the history and culture of less powerful groups are included in the texts. Thus, for example, a small and often separate section is included on “the contributions of women” and “minority groups,” but without any substantive elaboration of the view of the world as seen from their perspectives. Neo-­ conservatives have been particularly good at doing this today. Tony Bennett’s discussion of the process by which dominant cultures actually become dominant is worth quoting at length here. Dominant culture gains a purchase not in being imposed, as an alien external force, onto the cultures of subordinate groups, but by reaching into these cultures, reshaping them, hooking them and, with them, the people whose consciousness and experience is defined in their terms, into an association with the values and ideologies of the ruling groups in society. Such processes neither erase the cultures of subordinate groups, nor do they rob “the people” of their “true culture”: what they do do is shuffle those cultures on to an ideological and cultural terrain in which they can be disconnected from whatever radical impulses which may (but need not) have fuelled them and be connected to more conservative or, often, downright reactionary cultural and ideological tendencies.44 In some cases, “mentioning” may operate in exactly this way, integrating selective ele­ ments into the dominant tradition by bringing them into close association with the values of powerful groups. Thus, for instance, we will teach about AIDS, but only in

178   Cultural Politics and the Text the context of total abstinence or the sacredness of particular social constructions of the “traditional family.” There will be times, however, when such a strategy will not be successful. Oppositional cultures may at times use elements of the dominant culture against such groups. Bennett goes on, describing how oppositional cultures operate, as well. Similarly, resistance to the dominant culture does not take the form of launching against it a ready-­formed, constantly simmering oppositional culture—always there, but in need of being turned up from time to time. Oppositional cultural values are formed and take shape only in the context of their struggle with the dominant culture, a struggle which may borrow some of its resources from that culture and which must concede some ground to it if it is to be able to connect with it—and thereby with those whose consciousness and experience is partly shaped by it—in order, by turning it back upon itself, to peel it away, to create a space within and against it in which contradictory values can echo, reverberate and be heard.45 Some texts may, in fact, have such progressive “echoes” within them. There are victor­ ies in the politics of official knowledge, not only defeats. Sometimes, of course, not only are people successful in creating some space where such contradictory values can indeed “echo, reverberate, and be heard,” but they trans­ form the entire social space. They create entirely new kinds of governments, new possibilities for democratic political, economic, and cultural arrangements. In these situations, the role of education takes on even more importance, since new knowledge, new ethics, and a new reality seek to replace the old. This is one of the reasons that those of us committed to more participatory and democratic cultures inside and outside of schools must give serious attention to changes in official knowledge in those nations that have sought to overthrow their colonial or elitist heritage. Here, the pol­ itics of the text takes on special importance, since the textbook often represents an overt attempt to help create a new cultural reality. The case of the creation of more democratic textbooks and other educational materials based on the expressed needs of less powerful groups in Granada during the years of the New Jewel Movement pro­ vides a cogent example here,46 even though it was partly destroyed by Reagan’s inva­ sion of Granada. New social contexts, new processes of text creation, a new cultural politics, the transformation of authority relations, and new ways of reading texts, all of this can evolve and help usher in a positive rather than a negative sense of the power of the text. Less regulatory and more emancipatory relations of texts to real people can begin to evolve, a possibility made real in many of the programs of critical literacy that have had such a positive impact in nations throughout the world. Here people help create their own “texts,” ones that signify their emerging power in the control of their own destinies. However, we should not be overly romantic here. Such transformations of cultural authority and mechanisms of control and incorporation will not be easy. For example, certainly, the ideas and values of a people are not directly prescribed by the conceptions of the world of dominant groups and just as certainly there will be

Cultural Politics and the Text   179 many instances where people have been successful in creating realistic and workable alternatives to the culture and texts in dominance. Yet, we do need to acknowledge that the social distribution of what is considered legitimate knowledge is skewed in many nations. The social institutions directly concerned with the “transmission” of this knowledge, such as schools and the media, are grounded in and structured by the class, gender, sexual, and race inequalities that organize the society in which we live. The area of symbolic production is not divorced from the unequal relations of power that struc­ ture other spheres.47 Speaking only of class relations (much the same could be said about race, sex, and gender), Stuart Hall, one of the most insightful analysts of cultural politics, puts it this way: Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world do not directly prescribe the mental content of the illusions that supposedly fill the heads of dominated classes. But the circle of dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or classify the world for others; its classifications do acquire not only the constraining power of dominance over other modes of thought but also the initial authority of habit and instinct. It becomes the horizon of the taken-­forgranted: what the world is and how it works, for all practical purposes. Ruling ideas may dominate other conceptions of the social world by setting the limit on what will appear as rational, reasonable, credible, indeed sayable or thinkable within the given vocabularies of motive and action available to us. Their domi­ nance lies precisely in the power they have to contain within their limits, to frame within their circumference of thought, the reasoning and calculation of other social groups.48 In the United States, as I showed in chapters one and two, there has been a movement of exactly this kind. Dominant groups—really a coalition of economic modernizers, what has been called the old humanists, and neo-­conservative intellectuals—have attempted to create an ideological consensus around the return to traditional know­ ledge. The “great books” and “great ideas” of the “Western tradition” will preserve democracy. By returning to the common culture that has made this nation great, schools will increase student achievement and discipline, increase our international competitiveness, and ultimately reduce unemployment and poverty. Mirrored in the problematic educational and cultural visions of volumes such as Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy,49 this posi­ tion is probably best represented in quotes from former Secretary of Education William Bennett. In his view, we are finally emerging out of a crisis in which “we neglected and denied much of the best in American education.” For a period, “we simply stopped doing the right things [and] allowed an assault on intellectual and moral standards.” This assault on the current state of education has led schools to fall away from “the principles of our tradition.”50 Yet, for Bennett, “the people” have now risen up. “The 1980’s gave birth to a grass roots movement for educational reform that has generated a renewed commitment to excellence, character, and fundamentals.” Because of this, “we have reason for opti­ mism.”51 Why? Because

180   Cultural Politics and the Text the national debate on education is now focused on truly important matters: mas­ tering the basics; . . . insisting on high standards and expectations; ensuring discip­ line in the classroom; conveying a grasp of our moral and political principles; and nurturing the character of our young.52 Notice the use of “we,” “our,” and “the people” here. Notice as well the assumed con­ sensus on “basics” and “fundamentals” and the romanticization of the past both in schools and the larger society. The use of these terms, the attempt to bring people in under the ideological umbrella of the conservative restoration, is very clever rhetori­ cally. However, as many people in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere—where rightist governments have been very active in transforming what education is about— have begun to realize, this ideological incorporation is having no small measure of success at the level of policy and at the level of whose knowledge and values are to be taught.53 If this movement has its way, the texts made available and the knowledge included in them will surely represent a major loss for many of the groups who have had suc­ cesses in bringing their knowledge and culture more directly into the body of legiti­ mate content in schools. Just as surely, the ideologies that will dominate the official knowledge will represent a considerably more elitist orientation than what we have now. Yet, perhaps “surely” is not the correct word here. The situation is actually more complex than that, something we have learned from many of the newer methods of interpreting how social messages are actually “found” in texts. Allan Luke has dealt with such issues very persuasively. It would be best to quote him at length here. A major pitfall of research in the sociology of curriculum has been its willingness to accept text form as a mere adjunct means for the delivery of ideological content: the former described in terms of dominant metaphors, images, or key ideas; the latter described in terms of the sum total of values, beliefs, and ideas which might be seen to constitute a false consciousness. For much content analysis presumes that text mirrors or reflects a particular ideological position, which in turn can be connected to specific class interests. . . . It is predicated on the possibility of a one-­ to-one identification of school knowledge with textually represented ideas of the dominant classes. Even those critics who have recognized that the ideology encoded in auricular texts may reflect the internally contradictory character of a dominant culture have tended to neglect the need for a more complex model of text analysis, one that does not suppose that texts are simply readable, literal rep­ resentations of “someone else’s” version of social reality, objective knowledge and human relations. For texts do not always mean or communicate what they say.54 These are important points for they imply that we need more sophisticated and nuanced models of textual analysis. While we should certainly not be at all sanguine about the effects of the conservative restoration on texts and the curriculum, if texts don’t simply represent dominant beliefs in some straightforward way and if dominant cultures contain contradictions, fissures, and even elements of the culture of popular

Cultural Politics and the Text   181 groups, then our readings of what knowledge is “in” texts cannot be done by the appli­ cation of a simple formula. We can claim, for instance, that the meaning of a text is not necessarily intrinsic to it. As poststructuralist theories would have it, meaning is “the product of a system of differences into which the text is articulated.” Thus, there is not “one text,” but many. Any text is open to multiple readings. This puts into doubt any claim that one can determine the meanings and politics of a text “by a straightforward encounter with the text itself.” It also raises serious questions about whether one can fully understand the text by mechanically applying any interpretive procedure. Meanings, then, can be and are multiple and contradictory, and we must always be willing to “read” our own read­ ings of a text, to interpret our own interpretations of what it means.55 It seems that answering the questions of “whose knowledge” is in a text is not at all simple, though clearly the Right would very much like to reduce the range of meanings one might find. This is true of our own interpretations of what is in textbooks. But it is also just as true for the students who sit in schools and at home and read (or in many cases don’t read) their texts. I want to stress this point, not only at the level of theory and politics as I have been stressing here, but at the level of practice. We cannot assume that what is “in” the text is actually taught. Nor can we assume that what is taught is actually learned. As I show when I take us inside some classrooms in chapters five and six, teachers have a long history of mediating and transforming text material when they employ it in classrooms. Students bring their own classed, raced, religious, and gendered biographies with them as well. They, too, accept, reinter­ pret, and reject what counts as legitimate knowledge selectively. As critical ethnogra­ phies of schools have shown, and as later chapters will document, students (and teachers) are not empty vessels into which knowledge is poured. Rather than what Freire has called “banking” education going on,56 students are active constructors of the meanings of the education they encounter.57 We can talk about three ways in which people can potentially respond to a text: dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. In the dominant reading of a text, one accepts the messages at face value. In a negotiated response, the reader may dispute a par­ ticular claim, but accept the overall tendencies or interpretations of a text. Finally, an oppositional response rejects these dominant tendencies and interpretations. The reader “repositions” herself or himself in relation to the text and takes on the position of the oppressed.58 These are, of course, no more than ideal types and many responses will be a contradictory combination of all three. But the point is that not only do texts themselves have contradictory elements, but that audiences construct their own responses to texts. They do not passively receive texts, but actively read them based on their own class, race, gender, and religious experiences—although we must always remember that there are institutional constraints on oppositional readings. An immense amount of work needs to be done on student (and teacher) accept­ ance, interpretation, reinterpretation, or partial and/or total rejection of texts. While there is a tradition of such research, much of it quite good, most of this in education is done in an overly psychologized manner. It is more concerned with questions of learning and achievement than it is with the equally as important and prior issues of whose knowledge it is that students are learning, negotiating, or opposing and what

182   Cultural Politics and the Text the sociocultural roots and effects are of such processes. Yet we simply cannot fully understand the power of the text, what it does ideologically and politically (or educa­ tionally, for that matter) unless we take very seriously the way students actually read them—not only as individuals but as members of social groups with their own par­ ticular cultures and histories.59 For every textbook, then, there are multiple texts— contradictions within it, multiple readings of it, and different uses to which it will be put. Texts—be they the standardized, grade-­level specific books so beloved by school systems, or the novels, trade books, and alternative materials that teachers either use to supplement these books or simply to replace them—are part of a complex story of cultural politics. They can signify authority (not always legitimate) or freedom. And critical teachers throughout many nations have learned a good deal about how we can employ even the most conservative material into a site for reflexive and challenging activity that clarifies with students the realities they (teachers and students) experi­ ence and construct. They can search out, as so many of them have, material and ex­ periences that show the very possibility of alternative and oppositional interpretations of the world that go well beyond mere mentioning.60 This act is the core of the pro­ grams to which I pointed in chapter two. To recognize this, then, is also to recognize that our task as critically and democrati­ cally minded educators is itself a political one. We must acknowledge and understand the tremendous capacity of dominant institutions to regenerate themselves “not only in their material foundations and structures but in the hearts and minds of people.” Yet, at the very same time—and especially now with the Right being so powerful and with their increasing attention to politics at the local, county, and state levels—we need never to lose sight of the power of popular organizations, of real people, to struggle, resist, and transform them.61 Cultural authority, what counts as legitimate knowledge, what norms and values are represented in the officially sponsored curriculum of the school, all of these serve as important arenas in which the positive and negative rela­ tions of power surrounding the text will work themselves out, something I demon­ strate in chapter four. And all of them involve the hopes and dreams of real people in real institutions, in real relations of inequality. From all that I have said here, it should be clear that I oppose the idea that there can be one textual authority, one definitive set of “facts” that is divorced from its context of power relations. A “common culture” can never be an extension to everyone of what a minority mean and believe. Rather, and crucially, it requires not the stipulation and incorporation within textbooks of lists and concepts that make us all “culturally liter­ ate,” but the creation of the conditions necessary for all people to participate in the creation and re-­creation of meanings and values. It requires a democratic process in which all people—not simply those who see themselves as the intellectual guardians of the “Western tradition”—can be involved in the deliberation of what is important.62 It should go without saying that this necessitates the removal of the very real material obstacles (unequal power, wealth, time for reflection) that stand in the way of such participation.63 Whether a more “moderate” administration can provide substantial spaces for countering the New Right and for removing these obstacles will take some time to see. The very idea that there is one set of values that must guide the “selective tradition” can be a great danger, especially in contexts of differential power. Take, as one example,

Cultural Politics and the Text   183 a famous line that was printed on an equally famous public building. It read, “There is one road to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, diligence, honesty, order, cleanli­ ness, temperance, truth, sacrifice, and love of country.” Many people may perhaps agree with much of the sentiment represented by these words. It may be of some inter­ est that the building on which they appeared was in the administration block of the concentration camp at Dachau.64 We must ask, then, are we in the business of creating dead texts and dead minds? If we accept the title of educator—with all of the ethical and political commitments this entails—I think we already know what our answer should be. Critical literacy demands no less. These struggles over the politics of official knowledge—over the text as both a com­ modity and a set of meaningful practices—are grounded in the history of previous conflicts and accords. Here, too, compromises were made. And here, too, dominant groups attempted to move the terms of the compromise in their direction. Yet, once again, the accord had cracks, spaces for action, but ones that were always in danger of being coopted, as this history will show. Perhaps the best way to document this is to go even deeper into the politics of the text by focusing our attention on the growth of the activist state, on how the government—as a site of conflicting power relations and social movements—entered into the regulation of official knowledge. Conservatives (and even some of those upwardly mobile “cosmopolitan elites”) may have dominated here, but as we shall see, this is not the entire story.

Notes   1. This chapter is an expansion and refinement of the introductory chapter to Michael W. Apple and Linda Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook (New York: Routledge, 1991). Many of the essays in that volume are crucial to a more thorough understanding of the issues I raise here.   2. See John Willinsky, The New Literacy (New York: Routledge, 1990).   3. Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke, and Chris Weedon, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class (New York: Methuen, 1985), 164–165. For an exceptional treatment of “political literacy” in theory and practice, see Colin Lankshear with Moira Lawler, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1988).   4. John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), x.   5. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 149–150.   6. See, for example, Michael W. Apple and Lois Weis, eds., Ideology and Practice in Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).   7. For a current representative sample of the varied kinds of studies being done on the text­ book, see Arthur Woodward, David L. Elliot, and Kathleen Carter Nagel, eds., Textbooks in School and Society (New York: Garland, 1988). We need to make a distinction between the generic use of “texts” (all meaningful materials: symbolic, bodily, physical, etc., created by human, and sometimes “natural,” activity) and textbooks. My focus in this chapter is mostly on the latter, though many schools and many teachers use considerably more than standard­ ized textbook material. Also, in passing, I am more than a little concerned that some people have overstated the case that the world is “only a text.” See Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).   8. Fred Inglis, Popular Culture and Political Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 9.   9. Allan Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1988), 27–29. 10. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1990); Michael

184   Cultural Politics and the Text W. Apple, Education and Power (New York: Routledge, rev. ARK ed., 1985); and Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). 11. Michael W. Apple, “Redefining Equality: Authoritarian Populism and the Conservative Res­ toration,” Teachers College Record 90 (Winter 1988): 167–184. 12. See, for example, Susan Rose, Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan (New York: Routledge, 1988). 13. Allen Hunter, Children in the Service of Conservatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Institute for Legal Studies, 1988). 14. James Moffett, Storm in the Mountains (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988). 15. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961). See also Apple, Ideology and Curriculum. 16. Fred Inglis, The Management of Ignorance: A Political Theory of the Curriculum (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 22–23. 17. Ibid., 23. 18. Miriam Schipper, “Textbook Controversy: Past and Present,” New York University Education Quarterly 14 (Spring/Summer 1983): 31–36. 19. A. Graham Down, “Preface,” in Harriet Tyson-­Bernstein, A Conspiracy of Good Intentions: America’s Textbook Fiasco (Washington, D.C.: The Council for Basic Education, 1988), viii. 20. Harriet Tyson-­Bernstein, A Conspiracy of Good Intentions, 3. 21. Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1982), 199. 22. The social roots of such adoption policies will be discussed in chapter four. 23. The issues surrounding cultural imperialism and colonialism are nicely laid out in Philip Altbach and Gail Kelly, eds., Education and the Colonial Experience (New York: Transaction Books, 1984). For an excellent discussion of international relations over texts and knowledge, see Philip Altbach, The Knowledge Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 24. See the analysis of such power relations in Bruce Fuller, Growing Up Modem (New York: Routledge, 1991) and Martin Carnoy and Joel Samoff, Education and Social Transition in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 25. For some of the most elegant discussions of how we need to think about these “cultural silences,” see Leslie Roman and Linda Christian-­Smith with Elizabeth Ellsworth, eds., Becoming Feminine: The Politics of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Falmer, 1988). 26. Marcus Raskin, The Common Good (New York: Routledge, 1986). 27. Inglis, The Management of Ignorance, 142. 28. Inglis, Popular Culture and Political Power, 4. 29. Ibid. I have placed “dark side” in quotation marks in the previous sentence because of the dominant tendency to unfortunately equate darkness with negativity. This is just one of the ways popular culture expresses racism. See Michael Orni and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge 1986); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 30. Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 13. 31. Batsleer, Davies, O’Rourke, and Weedon, Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class. 32. Lankshear with Lawler, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution. 33. Batsleer et al. Rewriting English, 5. 34. James W. Fraser, “Agents of Democracy: Urban Elementary School Teachers and the Con­ ditions of Teaching,” in Donald Warren, ed., American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 128. 35. Apple, Teachers and Texts. 36. For further discussion of deskilling and reskilling, see Apple, Education and Power. 37. Margaret Haley, quoted in Fraser, “Agents of Democracy,” 128. 38. Haley, quoted in Fraser, “Agents of Democracy,” 138.

Cultural Politics and the Text   185 39. Tony Bennett, “Introduction: Popular Culture and ‘the Turn to Gramsci,’ ” in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott, eds., Popular Culture and Social Relations (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986), xvi. 40. The literature here is voluminous. For a more extended treatment see Apple, Education and Power; and Cameron McCarthy and Michael W. Apple, “Race, Class, and Gender in Amer­ ican Educational Research,” in Lois Weis, ed., Class, Race, and Gender in American Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). 41. See Apple, Ideology and Curriculum; and Linda Christian-­Smith, Becoming a Woman Through Romance (New York: Routledge, 1991). 42. Luke, Literacy, Textbooks· and Ideology, 24. 43. Tyson-­Bernstein, A Conspiracy of Good Intentions, 18. 44. Tony Bennett, “The Politics of the ‘Popular’ and Popular Culture,” 19. 45. Ibid. 46. See Didacus Jules, “Building Democracy,” in Michael W. Apple and Linda Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook (New York: Routledge, 1991), 259–287. 47. Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: Univer­ sity of Illinois Press, 1988), 44. 48. Ibid. 49. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 50. William Bennett, Our Children and Our Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 9. 51. Ibid., 10. 52. Ibid. 53. Apple, “Redefining Equality.” 54. Luke, Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology, 29–30. See also Allan Luke, “The Secular Word: Catholic Reconstructions of Dick and Jane,” in Apple and Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook, 166–190. 55. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, “Introduction: The Territory of Marxism,” in Nelson and Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 8. 56. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1973). 57. See, for example, Paul Willis, Learning to Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Angela McRobbie, “Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity,” in Women’s Studies Group, ed., Women Take Issue (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 96–108; Robert Ever­ hart, Reading, Writing and Resistance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Lois Weis, Between Two Worlds (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Bonnie Trudell, Doing Sex Education (New York: Routledge, in press); and Christian-­Smith, Becoming a Woman Through Romance. 58. Tania Modleski, “Introduction,” in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1986), xi. 59. See Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best,” in Roman, Christian-­Smith, with Ellsworth, Becoming Feminine, 102–119; Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” Harvard Educational Review 59 (August 1989): 297–324; and Christian-­Smith, Becoming a Woman Through Romance. 60. For an example of powerful and compelling literature for younger students, see the discus­ sion in Joel Taxel, “Reclaiming the Voice of Resistance: The Fiction of Mildred Taylor,” in Apple and Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook, 111–134. 61. Batsleer et al. Rewriting English, 5. 62. This is discussed in more detail in the new preface to the second edition of Apple, Ideology and Curriculum. 63. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (New York: Verso, 1989), 37–38. 64. David Home, The Public Culture (Dover, NH: Pluto Press, 1986), 76.

10 Consuming the Other Whiteness, Education, and Cheap French Fries

Eating Cheap French Fries The sun glared off of the hood of the small car as we made our way along the two-­lane road. The heat and humidity made me wonder if I’d have any liquid left in my body at the end of the trip and led me to appreciate Wisconsin winters a bit more than one might expect. The idea of winter seemed more than a little remote in this Asian country for which I have a good deal of fondness. But the topic at hand was not the weather; rather, it was the struggles of educators and social activists to build an education that was considerably more democratic than what was in place in that country now. This was a dangerous topic. Discussing it in philosophical and formalistically academic terms was tolerated there. Openly calling for it and situating it within a serious analysis of the economic, political, and military power structures that now exerted control over so much of this nation’s daily life was another matter. As we traveled along that rural road in the midst of one of the best conversations I had engaged in about the possibilities of educational transformations and the realities of the oppressive conditions so many people were facing in that land, my gaze somehow was drawn to the side of the road. In one of those nearly accidental happenings that clarify and crystallize what reality is really like, my gaze fell upon a seemingly inconsequential object. At regular intervals, there were small signs planted in the dirt a few yards from where the road met the fields. The sign was more than a little familiar. It bore the insignia of one of the most famous fast food restaurants in the United States. We drove for miles past seemingly deserted fields along a flat hot plain, passing sign after sign, each a replica of the previous one, each less than a foot high. These were not billboards. Such things hardly existed in this poor rural region. Rather, they looked exactly—exactly—like the small signs one finds next to farms in the American Midwest that signify the kinds of seed corn that each farmer had planted in her or his fields. This was a good guess, it turned out. I asked the driver—a close friend and former student of mine who had returned to this country to work for the social and educational reforms that were so necessary— what turned out to be a naive but ultimately crucial question in my own education. “Why are those signs for _______ there? Is there a _______ restaurant nearby?” My friend looked at me in amazement. “Michael, don’t you know what these signs signify? There’s no western restaurants within fifty miles of where we are. These signs represent exactly what is wrong with education in this nation. Listen to this.” And I listened.

Consuming the Other   187 The story is one that has left an indelible mark on me, for it condenses in one powerful set of historical experiences the connections between our struggles as educators and activists in so many countries and the ways differential power works in ordinary life. I cannot match the tensions and passions in my friend’s voice as this story was told; nor can I convey exactly the almost eerie feelings one gets when looking at that vast, sometimes beautiful, sometimes scarred, and increasingly depopulated plain. Yet the story is crucial to hear. Listen to this. The government of the nation has decided that the importation of foreign capital is critical to its own survival.1 Bringing in American, German, British, Japanese, and other investors and factories will ostensibly create jobs, will create capital for investment, and will enable the nation to speed into the twenty-­first century. (This is of course elite group talk, but let us assume that all of this is indeed truly believed by dominant groups.) One of the ways the military-­dominated government has planned to do this is to focus part of its recruitment efforts on agribusiness. In pursuit of this aim, it has offered vast tracts of land to international agribusiness concerns at very low cost. Of particular importance to the plain we are driving through is the fact that much of this land has been given over to a supplier for a large American fast food restaurant corporation for the growing of potatoes for the restaurant’s french fries, one of the trademarks of its extensive success throughout the world. The corporation was eager to jump at the opportunity to shift a good deal of its potato production from the United States to Asia. Since many of the farm workers in the United States were now unionized and were (correctly) asking for a liveable wage, and since the government of that Asian nation officially frowned on unions of any kind, the cost of growing potatoes would be lower. Further, the land on that plain was perfect for the use of newly developed technology to plant and harvest the crop with considerably fewer workers. Machines would replace living human beings. Finally, the government was much less concerned about environmental regulations. All in all, this was a fine bargain for capital. Of course, people lived on some of this land and farmed it for their own food and to sell what might be left over after their own—relatively minimal—needs were met. This deterred neither agribusiness nor the government. After all, people could be moved to make way for “progress.” And after all, the villagers along that plain did not actually have deeds to the land. (They had lived there for perhaps hundreds of years, well before the invention of banks, and mortgages, and deeds—no paper, no ownership.) It would not be too hard to move the people off of the plain to other areas to “free” it for intensive potato production and to “create jobs” by taking away the livelihood of thousands upon thousands of small-­scale farmers in the region. I listened with rapt attention as the rest of the story unfolded and as we passed by the fields with their miniature corporate signs and the abandoned villages. The people whose land had been taken for so little moved, of course. As in so many other similar places throughout what dominant groups call the Third World, they trekked to the city. They took their meager possessions and moved into the ever-­expanding slums within and surrounding the one place that held out some hope of finding enough paid work (if everyone—including children—labored) so that they could survive. The government and major segments of the business elite officially discouraged this, sometimes by hiring thugs to burn the shanty towns, other times by keeping conditions

188   Consuming the Other so horrible that no one would “want” to live there. But still the dispossessed came, by the tens of thousands. Poor people are not irrational, after all. The loss of arable land had to be compensated for somehow and if it took cramming into places that were deadly at times, well what were the other choices? There were factories being built in and around the cities which paid incredibly low wages—sometimes less than enough money to buy sufficient food to replace the calories expended by workers in the production process—but at least there might be paid work if one was lucky. So the giant machines harvested the potatoes and the people poured into the cities and international capital was happy. It’s not a nice story, but what does it have to do with education? My friend continued my education. The military-­dominated government had given all of these large international businesses twenty years of tax breaks to sweeten the conditions for their coming to that country. Thus, there was now very little money to supply the health care facilities, housing, running water, electricity, sewage disposal, and schools for the thousands upon thousands of people who had sought their future in or had literally been driven into the city. The mechanism for not building these necessities was quite clever. Take the lack of any formal educational institutions as a case in point. In order for the government to build schools it had to be shown that there was a “legitimate” need for such expenditure. Statistics had to be produced in a form that was officially accepted. This could only be done through the official determination of numbers of registered births. Yet, the very process of official registration made it impossible for thousands of children to be recognized as actually existing. In order to register for school, a parent had to register the birth of the child at the local hospital or government office—none of which existed in these slum areas. And even if you could somehow find such an office, the government officially discouraged people who had originally come from outside the region of the city from moving there. It often refused to recognize the legitimacy of the move as a way of keeping displaced farmers from coming into the urban areas and thereby increasing the population. Births from people who had no “legitimate” right to be there did not count as births at all. It is a brilliant strategy in which the state creates categories of legitimacy that define social problems in quite interesting ways (see, e.g., Curtis, 1992; Fraser, 1989). Foucault would have been proud, I am certain. Thus, there are no schools, no teachers, no hospitals, no infrastructure. The root causes of this situation rest not in the immediate situation. They can only be illuminated if we focus on the chain of capital formation internationally and nationally, on the contradictory needs of the state, on the class relations and the relations between country and city that organize and disorganize that country. My friend and I had been driving for quite a while now. I had forgotten about the heat. The ending sentence of the story pulled no punches. It was said slowly and quietly, said in a way that made it even more compelling. “Michael, these fields are the reason there’s no schools in my city. There’s no schools because so many folks like cheap french fries.” I tell this story about the story told to me for a number of reasons. First, it is simply one of the most powerful ways I know of reminding myself and all of us of the utter importance of seeing schooling relationally, of seeing it as connected—fundamentally—to the relations of domination and exploitation of the larger society. Second, and

Consuming the Other   189 equally as important, I tell this story to make a crucial theoretical and political point. Relations of power are indeed complex and we do need to take very seriously the postmodern focus on the local and on the multiplicity of the forms of struggle that need to be engaged. It is important as well to recognize the changes that are occurring in many societies and to see the complexity of the “power/knowledge” nexus. Yet in our attempts to avoid the dangers that accompanied some aspects of previous “grand narratives,” let us not act as if capitalism has somehow disappeared. Let us not act as if class relations don’t count. Let us not act as if all of the things we learned about how the world might be understood politically have been somehow overthrown because our theories are now more complex. The denial of basic human rights, the destruction of the environment, the deadly conditions under which people (barely) survive, the lack of a meaningful future for the thousands of children I noted in my story—all of this is not only or even primarily a “text” to be deciphered in our academic volumes as we pursue our postmodern themes. It is a reality that millions of people experience in their very bodies every day. Educational work that is not connected deeply to a powerful understanding of these realities (and this understanding cannot evacuate a serious analysis of political economy and class relations without losing much of its power) is in danger of losing its soul. The lives of our children demand no less.

On Whiteness It would not have been wrong to end this chapter with the last sentence of the previous paragraph. But, I want to engage in a few more reflections about what the story I told means, for I think that the issue of cheap french fries provides an extremely important example both of the politics of commonsense and of the politics of “whiteness.” In the story I have told, race and class intersect with colonial and neocolonial relations, both nationally and internationally. I have focused on the connections between consumption practices in the United States and the immiseration of identifiable people in one Asian nation. The emerging class relations that are created here are clear I think. The destructiveness of the relations of production and the accompanying impoverishment of thousands upon thousands of people in one nation go hand in hand with the ability of people in the other nation to consume. Yet this is also a story of racial dynamics and their institutionalization in colonial and neocolonial forms (see McCarthy and Crichlow, 1995). Relations of “whiteness” are structurally recreated here. It is not a historical accident that such international relations are created and tolerated between an arrogant “center” and a “periphery” that—when it is seen at all—is seen by those in that “center” as populated by “disposable” people who to imperial eyes are somehow “different” and “less than.” Why isn’t this obvious?2 As educators, we are involved in the struggle over meaning. Yet, in this society as in all others, only certain meanings are considered “legitimate,” only certain ways of understanding the world get to be called “official knowledge” (Apple, 1993; Apple, 1990). This doesn’t just happen. Our society is structured in such a way that dominant meanings are more likely to circulate. These meanings, of course, will be contested, will be resisted and sometimes transformed (Willis, 1990); but, this does not lessen the fact that hegemonic cultures have greater power to make themselves known and acceptable.

190   Consuming the Other John Fiske articulates the point that our ordinary meanings are implicated in power relations well. Culture making (and culture is always in process, never achieved) is a social process: all meanings of self, of social relations, all the discourses and texts that play such important cultural roles can circulate only in relationship to the social system, in our case of white, patriarchal capitalism. Any social system needs a cultural system of meanings that serves either to hold it in place or destabilize it, to make it more amenable to change. Culture . . . and meanings . . . [are] therefore inherently political. [They are] centrally involved in the distribution and possible redistribution of various forms of social power. (Fiske, 1989, p. 1) As he goes on to say, Knowledge is never neutral, it never exists in an empiricist, objective relationship to the real. Knowledge is power, and the circulation of knowledge is part of the social distribution of power. The discursive power to construct a commonsense reality that can be inserted into cultural and political life is central in the social relationship of power. (Fiske, 1989, pp. 149–150) These are general claims, but when they are applied to the specifics of the situation I related earlier they become even more cogent. They place my need to be taught about the conditions on that verdant plain into its wider sociocultural context. They crystallize in one story differences in meaning making that separate what in the “West” might be seen as simply eating potatoes and in that Asian nation is seen by many activists as destroying any possibilities for a better future for thousands of children. The story documents the importance of asking “Whose understandings circulate? Why did I not know about this? What is my own structural location in an international system of economic relations that produces these conditions?” The story speaks to the continued circulation of colonial forms of understanding, associated in complex and everchanging ways to the modes of economic production, distribution, and consumption we inhabit. In many ways, most of us are caught up in the universalizing discourses of our own world, a world that assumes that we somehow already “know” how to understand the daily events in which we engage. Yet, the story I was told on that car ride and what I saw speak to the issue of whose reality, whose knowledge, is made public. Edward Said’s apposite words come to mind here. Without significant exception the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-­European world. There is incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct rule; there is coercion. But there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known. (Said, 1993, p. 50)

Consuming the Other   191 Said’s points speak to the relationship between the forms of understanding that dominate “our” society and the silencing of the voices of the “non-­European,” “non-­ Western” world. Yet it is not only the voices that are silenced (and I consciously employ the word silenced rather than silent to signify that this is an active process in which dominant groups have to work to maintain the power of their hegemonic meanings) (see Apple, 1996), so that it is nearly by accident that I am in a position to be taught to see the world differently. It is the determinate connections between lives in what unfortunately and arrogantly has been called “center” and “periphery” that are made invisible at the very same time. This invisibility is crucial. There is a social geography of whiteness. Whiteness is a spatial concept in many ways. In this case, it implies living a life that is intimately connected—in identifiable ways— to the international dynamics that are so radically altering the economic, political, and cultural relations in many nations throughout the world. It is not necessarily based on a conscious choice. Rather, it is deeply cemented into our commonsense understandings of daily life. We buy our clothes, eat our food, and do the things we do in a manner that naturalizes the social and economic relations that actually created the conditions for the production and consumption of those clothes and that food. Whiteness, then, is a metaphor for privilege, for the ability to eat cheap french fries. Of course, this is neither a very new nor original point. There is quite a long tradition within political economy of reminding us that any manufactured object is not merely a thing that one can, say, hold in one’s hand. Such a view is more than a little reifying in fact. Rather, a manufactured or processed object—from cars to sneakers to shirts and even to the food we place in our mouths—is the concrete embodiment of the human labor and the productive and destructive social relations that resulted in or were the result of its making. Thus, eating cheap french fries is putting food in one’s mouth, chewing, and swallowing. Yet, at the very same time, it is also and profoundly a fully social act. It is engaging in the end point of a long chain of relations that drove people off the land, caused their flight to the slums, and denied their children health care and schools. Even more immediately, it is to be in a relationship with the workers who cooked the fries and served them at that fast food restaurant, workers who usually have extremely low pay, no benefits, no unions, and must try to cobble together two or three part-­time jobs to try to put food on their own tables. I am tempted to say here that eating cheap french fries is one of the ultimate expressions of whiteness. In much the same way, nearly all of the economic benefits enjoyed today by the affluent—and even by the not so affluent—in this country rest on the historical development of an economic infrastructure that was dependent on cheap and/or unpaid labor, labor that often had race as a constitutive dynamic underpinning it. Thus, it would not be an overstatement to say that the North’s industrial base of textile mills was fed by the unpaid labor of slaves who grew the raw material in the South (as, of course, the entire economy was dependent on the unpaid labor of women in the home and on the farm). For hundreds of years, capitalism and slavery were bound together in a tense relationship. In this way, whiteness as privilege is not only a spatial metaphor, but a temporal one as well. The conditions of existence out of which our current economy grew have their roots in the soil of the hundreds of years of such labor. “We” currently live the benefits of that labor. (It is unfortunately the case that a serious

192   Consuming the Other ­ iscussion of the fact that these current and so unequally controlled and distributed d “benefits” are fully dependent on these historical relations hardly ever surfaces in the official knowledge of the school curriculum. This speaks volumes about the importance of what is not taught in schools, as well as what is part of the corpus of “legitimate” knowledge.) Take the chapter you are reading. This morning, Michael Apple came into his office, opened the door, turned on the lights, and began to type. We can interpret this as a simple physical act. Apple puts his hand on the light switch, flips the switch up, and the light comes on. Yet this simple act is not so simple, for it too must be understood relationally. Michael also just had an anonymous—but no less real—relationship with the men and women miners who dug the coal, in often dangerous and increasingly exploitative conditions, that was burned to produce the electricity. The act of typing this paper is utterly dependent on that labor. My aim here is to make a serious point about the nature of commonsense. “Our” —here read largely white, economically advantaged group(s)—ordinary ways of understanding our daily activity inside and outside of education can make it extremely difficult for us to fully appreciate the nexus of social relations in which we participate. In Fiske’s words, I want to “destabilize” our ordinary understandings of education and of our own places in the larger society. As Antonio Gramsci reminded us, racial, gender, and class dominance is legitimated through the creation of commonsense, through consent. This point is especially important now given the conservative restoration that is so powerful in the economic, political, and cultural spheres of society, since an understanding of the structural nature of these connections is being evacuated from our daily lives (Apple, 1993; Apple, 1996). My basic wish is to have us think the social, recognize that we live lives involved in domination and subordination in very hidden ways. Comprehending this may require that we wrench ourselves out of commonsense, for we are deeply connected whether we like it or not. This requires that we see whiteness as itself a relational term. White is defined not as a state, but as a relation to black, or brown, or yellow, or red. Center is defined as a relation to periphery. In our usual ways of thinking about this, whiteness is something you don’t have to think about. It is just there. It is a naturalized state of being. It is “normal.” Anything else is “other.” It is the there that is never there.3 But, it is there, for in repositioning ourselves to see the world as constituted out of relations of power and privilege, whiteness as privilege plays a crucial role. This very sense of connectedness, of relationality, in its international context is made clear in the stammering words of Mr. “Whiskey” Sisodia in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (quoted in Bhabha, 1994, p. 6). Substituting the word “American” for “Engenglish” does little damage to Rushdie’s insight about the nature of our understanding—and lack of it—of international relations and the differential benefits that come from the ways these relations are structured today.

Consuming the Other   193

Afterthoughts By Way of a Conclusion Now I often find autobiographical accounts and narrative renderings compelling and insightful. And, clearly, since I have used that form in this chapter, I do not want to dismiss their power. However—and let me be blunt about my worry here—just as often such writing runs the risk of lapsing into possessive individualism (Apple, 1995). Even when an author does the “correct thing” and discusses her or his social location in a world dominated by oppressive conditions, such writing can serve the chilling function of basically saying, “But enough about you, let me tell you about me,” if we are not more reflexive about this than often has been the case. I am still committed enough to raising questions about class and race dynamics to worry about perspectives that supposedly acknowledge the missing voices of many people in our thinking about education, but still wind up privileging the white, middle-­class woman’s or man’s seemingly infinite need for self-­display. Do not misconstrue what I am saying here. As so much feminist and postcolonial work has documented, the personal is often the absent presence behind even the most eviscerated writing (see, e.g., McCarthy and Crichlow, 1993). But, at the same time, it is equally crucial that we interrogate our own “hidden” motives in those instances when we employ such modes of presentation. Is the insistence on the personal, an insistence that underpins much of the turn to literary and autobiographical forms, partly a class discourse as well? We should grant their power in uncovering how the world is constructed along multiple axes of power and in uncovering our personal participation in these axes. However, while “the personal may be the political,” does the political end at the personal? Furthermore, why should we assume that the personal is any less difficult to understand than the “external” world? I raise these questions, but I cannot answer them for all situations. What I can say is that these questions need to be asked of all of us who are committed to the multiple projects involved in struggling for a more emancipatory education. For this very reason, I have told a story of my own education—as a white, foreign visitor—that is consciously connected to a clear sense of the realities of structurally generated relations of exploitation and domination that play such a large part in whether education is even there. It was an education about “being white” internationally, an education that clarified for me how privilege works its way out even in our most basic human acts such as eating. As you might expect, as I am certain many of you would have done if you had a similar experience, I am now much more consciously involved in supporting the actions of democratic movements in that Asian nation both here in the United States and there. As you also might expect, I don’t eat cheap french fries.

Notes 1. I realize that not naming the country runs the risk of essentializing “Asia.” It can make it seem as if all “Asian” countries can be merged into one undifferentiated representation. This ideological risk is real. However, given the volatility of the political situation there and the possible threat to colleagues who have been challenging government policies such as the one I describe here, I think that it is better to err on the side of caution and to allow for anonymity of both nation and people in this case. 2. Internal class and ethnic dynamics of power need to be considered here as well. It is also not an accident that these ideological forms so long associated with the growth of colonialism and

194   Consuming the Other neocolonialism and with the internationalization of capital are appropriated by elites within nations that are seen as “peripheral.” Thus, this focus on international dynamics in which class and race intersect and influence each other needs to be complemented by an internal analysis. Specific people buy the hamburgers and french fries—products that have made this restaurant so famous the world over—within this Asian nation as well. And the price is well above what the average worker can afford. Eating these french fries is an option only for the affluent. They too reap the benefits of these relations. They eat; and they pay no taxes to support the building of schools, the salaries of teachers, the cost of textbooks, the availability of even minimal health care—and the list seems endless—that the state has declared is “unnecessary” for the “invisible” children whose very absence speaks even more eloquently to their social presence on the landscape of exploitative relations. On an even more general level, obviously much more needs to be said about the distinct yet overlapping dynamics of race, colonialism, and class here. These are overdetermined situations, both nationally and internationally, in which multiple relations of power work off of, mediate, transform, and even contradict each other in extremely complex ways. This issue is discussed in more detail in Apple (1993) and Apple (1995). 3. There is evidence that the reactionary politics of the current conservative restoration is changing this, however. A consciousness of “being white” is growing, but in dangerous ways. This can be seen in the organized attacks on affirmative action policies, in the increasing acceptance once again of pseudoscientific explanations of racial and gender “inferiority” (see, e.g., Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), and in the militant and racist Christian Identity movements that are gaining more power in a number of nations.

References Apple, Michael W. (1990). Ideology and Curriculum, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Apple, Michael W. (1993). Official Knowledge. New York: Routledge. Apple, Michael W. (1995). Education and Power, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Apple, Michael W. (1996). Cultural Politics and Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Curtis, Bruce. (1992). True Government by Choice Men? Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fiske, John. (1989). Reading the Popular. Boston: Unwin and Hyman. Fraser, Nancy. (1989). Unruly Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herrnstein, Richard, and Murray, Charles (1994). The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press. McCarthy, Cameron, and Crichlow, Warren, eds. (1993). Race, Identity, and Representation in Education. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Willis, Paul, with Jones, Simon, Canaan, Joyce, and Hurd, Geoff. (1990). Common Culture. Boulder: Westview Press.

11 The Politics of Official Knowledge Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?

Education is deeply implicated in the politics of culture. The curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the cultural, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a people. As I argue in Ideology and Curriculum and Official Knowledge, the decision to define some groups’ knowledge as the most legitimate, as official knowledge, while other groups’ knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says something extremely important about who has power in society.1 Think of social studies texts that continue to speak of “the Dark Ages” rather than the historically more accurate and much less racist phrase, “the age of African and Asian Ascendancy” or books that treat Rosa Parks as merely a naive African American woman who was simply too tired to go to the back of the bus, rather than discussing her training in organized civil disobedience at the Highlander Folk School. The realization that teaching, especially at the elementary school level, has in large part been defined as women’s paid work—with its accompanying struggles over autonomy, pay, respect, and deskilling—documents the connections between curriculum and teaching and the history of gender politics as well.2 Thus, whether we like it or not, differential power intrudes into the very heart of curriculum, teaching, and evaluation. What counts as knowledge, the ways in which it is organized, who is empowered to teach it, what counts as an appropriate display of having learned it, and—just as critically—who is allowed to ask and answer all these questions, are part and parcel of how dominance and subordination are reproduced and altered in this society.3 There is, then, always a politics of official knowledge, a politics that embodies conflict over what some regard as simply neutral descriptions of the world and what others regard as elite conceptions that empower some groups while disempowering others. Speaking in general about how elite culture, habits, and “tastes” function, Pierre Bourdieu puts it this way: The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the s­uperiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is

196   The Politics of Official Knowledge why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberatively or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social difference.4 As he goes on to say, these cultural forms, “through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose, . . . are bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic of different classes and class fractions.”5 Thus, cultural form and content function as markers of class.6 The granting of sole legitimacy to such a system of culture through its incorporation within the official centralized curriculum, then, creates a situation in which the markers of “taste” become the markers of people. The school becomes a class school. The tradition of scholarship and activism that has formed me has been based on exactly these insights: the complex relationships between economic capital and cultural capital, the role of the school in reproducing and challenging the multitude of unequal relations of power (ones that go well beyond class, of course), and the ways the content and organization of the curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation function in all of this. It is at exactly this time that these issues must be taken most seriously. This is a period—what I called the conservative restoration—when the conflicts over the politics of official knowledge are severe. At stake I believe is the very idea of public education, and the very idea of a curriculum that responds to the cultures and histories of large and growing segments of the American population. Even with a “moderate” Democratic presidential administration temporarily in Washington at the time of this writing, many of its own commitments embody the tendencies I shall speak of here. In fact, it is exactly because there is now a somewhat more “moderate” administration at a national level that we must think quite carefully about what can happen in the future as it is pulled—for political reasons—in increasingly conservative directions due to its own weak commitments and the growing power of rightist politicians in Congress and at the state and local levels. I want to instantiate these arguments through an analysis of the proposals for a national curriculum and national testing. But in order to understand them, we must think relationally, we must connect these proposals to the larger program of the conservative restoration. I want to argue that behind the educational justifications for a national curriculum and national testing is an ideological attack that is very dangerous. Its effects will be truly damaging to those who already have the most to lose in this society. I shall first present a few interpretive cautions. Then I shall analyze the general project of the rightist agenda. Third, I shall show the connections between national curricula and national testing and the increasing focus on privatization and “choice” plans. And, finally, I want to discuss the patterns of differential benefits that will likely result from all this.

The Question of a National Curriculum Where should those of us who count ourselves a part of the long progressive tradition in education stand in relationship to the call for a national curriculum? At the outset, I want to make something clear. I am not opposed in principle to a national curriculum. Nor am I opposed in principle to the idea or activity of testing. Rather, I want to provide a more conjunctural set of arguments, one based on a claim

The Politics of Official Knowledge   197 that at this time—given the balance of social forces—there are very real dangers of which we must be quite conscious. I shall confine myself largely to the negative case in this chapter. My task is a simple one: to raise enough serious questions to make us stop and think about the implications of moving in this direction in a time of conservative triumphalism. We are not the only nation where a largely rightist coalition has put such proposals on the educational agenda. In England, a national curriculum, first introduced by the Thatcher government, is now mostly in place. It consists of “core and foundation subjects” such as mathematics, science, technology, history, art, music, physical education, and a modern foreign language. Working groups to determine standard goals, “attainment targets,” and content in each have already brought forth their results. This is accompanied by a national system of achievement testing—one that is both expensive and takes a considerable amount of classroom time—for all students in state-­run schools at the ages of 7, 11, 14, and 16.7 The assumption in many quarters is that we must follow the lead of other nations— such as Britain and especially Japan—or we shall be left behind. Yet, it is crucial that we understand that we already have a national curriculum, but that it is determined by the complicated nexus of state textbook adoption policies and the market in textbook publishing.8 Thus, we have to ask if a national curriculum—one that undoubtedly will be linked to a system of national goals and nationally standardized instruments of evaluation (quite probably standardized tests, due to time and money)—is better than an equally widespread but somewhat more hidden national curriculum established by state textbook adoption states (such as California and Texas with their control of 20–30% of the market in textbooks).9 Despite the existence of this hidden national curriculum, there is a growing feeling that a standardized set of national curricular goals and guidelines is essential to “raise standards” and to hold schools accountable for their students’ achievement or lack of it. It is true that many people from an array of educational and political positions are involved in calls for higher standards, more rigorous curricula at a national level, and a system of national testing. Yet we must always ask one question: What group is leading these “reform” efforts? This, of course, leads to another, broader question. Who will benefit and who will lose as a result of all this? I shall contend that, unfortunately, rightist groups are indeed setting the political agenda in education and that, in general, the same pattern of benefits that has characterized nearly all areas of social policy—in which the top 20% of the population reap 80% of the benefits10—will be reproduced here. Of course, we need to be very cautious of the genetic fallacy, the assumption that because a policy or a practice originates within a distasteful position it is fundamentally determined, in all its aspects, by its origination within that tradition. Take Edward L. Thorndike, one of the most influential educational psychologists of the early twentieth century. The fact that his social beliefs were often repugnant—with his participation in the popular eugenics movement and his notions of racial, gender, and class hierarchies—does not necessarily destroy, at each and every movement, his research on learning. While I am not at all a supporter of this paradigm of research—whose epis­ temological and social implications continue to need major criticism11—to oppose it requires a different kind of argument than that based on origination. (Indeed, one can

198   The Politics of Official Knowledge find some progressive educators in the past who turned to Thorndike for support for some of their claims about what needed to be transformed in our curriculum and pedagogy.) Of course, it is not only those who are identified with the rightist project who argue for a national curriculum. Others who historically have been identified with a more liberal agenda have attempted to make a case.12 Smith, O’Day, and Cohen suggest a positive if cautionary vision for a national curriculum. A national curriculum would involve the invention of new examinations—a technically, conceptually, and politically difficult task. It would require the teaching of more rigorous content and thus would ask teachers to engage in more demanding and exciting work. Our teachers and administrators would have to “deepen their knowledge of academic subjects and change their conceptions of knowledge itself.” Teaching and learning would have to be seen as “more active and inventive.” Teachers, administrators, and students would need “to become more thoughtful, collaborative, and participatory.”13 In Smith, O’Day, and Cohen’s words: Conversion to a national curriculum could only succeed if the work of conversion were conceived and undertaken as a grand, cooperative learning venture. Such an enterprise would fail miserably if it were conceived and organized chiefly as a technical process of developing new exams and materials and then “disseminating” or implementing them.14 They go on to say: A worthwhile, effective national curriculum would also require the creation of much new social and intellectual connective tissue. For instance, the content and pedagogy of teacher education would have to be closely related to the content of and pedagogy of the schools’ curriculum. The content and pedagogy of examinations would have to be tied to those of the curriculum and teacher education. Such connections do not now exist.15 The authors conclude that such a revitalized system, one in which such coordination would be built, “will not be easy, quick, or cheap,” especially if it is to preserve variety and initiative. “If Americans continue to want educational reform on the cheap, a national curriculum would be a mistake.”16 I couldn’t agree more with this last point. Yet, what they do not sufficiently recognize is that much of what they fear is already going on in the very linkage for which they call. Even more important, it is what they do not pay sufficient attention to—the connections between a national curriculum and national testing and the larger rightist agenda—that constitutes the greatest danger. I wish to focus on this.

Between Neoconservatism and Neoliberalism Conservatism by its very name announces one interpretation of its agenda. It conserves. Other interpretations are possible, of course. One could say, somewhat more wryly, that conservatism believes that nothing should be done for the first time.17 Yet

The Politics of Official Knowledge   199 in many ways, this would be deceptive. For with the Right now in ascendancy in many nations, we are witnessing a much more activist project. Conservative politics now are very much the politics of alteration; clearly the idea of “Do nothing for the first time” is not a sufficient explanation of what is going on either in education or elsewhere.18 Conservatism has in fact meant different things at different times and places. At times, it involves defensive actions; at other times, it involves taking initiative against the status quo.19 Today we are witnessing both. Because of this, it is important that I set out the larger social context in which the current politics of official knowledge operates. There has been a breakdown in the accord that guided a good deal of educational policy since World War II. Powerful groups within government and the economy, and within “authoritarian populist”20 social movements, have been able to redefine—often in very retrogressive ways—the terms of debate in education, social welfare, and other areas of the common good. What education is for is being transformed. No longer is education seen as part of a social alliance in which many “minority”21 groups, women, teachers, community activists, progressive legislators and government officials, and others joined together to propose (limited) social democratic policies for schools: expanding educational opportunities, attempts at equalizing outcomes, developing special programs in bilingual and multicultural education, and so on. As I noted in Chapter 1, a new alliance has been formed, one that has increasing power in educational and social policy. This power bloc combines business with the New Right and with neoconservative intellectuals. Its interests are not in increasing the life chances of women, people of color, or labor. Rather it aims at providing the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasing international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticized past of the “ideal” home, family, and school.22 The power of this alliance can be seen in a number of educational policies and proposals: (1) programs for “choice” such as voucher plans and tax credits to make schools more like the thoroughly idealized free-­market economy; (2) the movement at national and state levels throughout the country to “raise standards” and mandate both teacher and student “competencies” and basic curricular goals and knowledge increasingly through the implementation of statewide and national testing; (3) the increasingly effective attacks on the school curriculum for its anti-­family and anti-­free-enterprise “bias,” its secular humanism, its lack of patriotism, and its supposed neglect of the knowledge and values of the “Western tradition” and of “real knowledge”; and (4) the growing pressure to make the perceived needs of business and industry into the primary goals of the school.23 In essence, the new alliance in favor of the conservative restoration has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The alliance’s objectives in education are the same as those that guide its economic and social welfare goals. These include the expansion of the “free market,” the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs (although the Clinton administration originally did mediate this in symbolic and not very extensive—or very expensive—ways), the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility, the lowering of people’s expectations for economic security, and the popularization of what is clearly a form of social Darwinist thinking.24 As I have argued at length elsewhere, the political Right in the United States has been very successful in mobilizing support against the educational system and its

200   The Politics of Official Knowledge e­ mployees, often exporting the crisis in the economy to the schools. Thus, one of its major achievements has been to shift the blame for unemployment and underemployment, for the loss of economic competitiveness, and for the supposed breakdown of “traditional” values and standards in the family, education, and paid and unpaid workplaces, from the economic, cultural, and social policies and effects of dominant groups to the school and other public agencies. As I stated in Chapter 1, “public” now is the center of all evil; “private” is the center of all that is good.25 Four trends have characterized the conservative restoration in both the United States and Britain—privatization, centralization, vocationalization, and differentiation.26 These are actually the results largely of differences within the most powerful wings of this alliance—neoliberalism and neoconservatism—to which I pointed earlier. Neoliberalism has a vision of the weak state. A society that lets the “invisible hand” of the free market guide all aspects of its forms of social interaction is seen as both efficient and democratic. On the other hand, neoconservatism is guided by a vision of the strong state in certain areas, especially over the politics of the body and gender and race relations, over standards, values, and conduct, and over what knowledge should be passed on to future generations.27 Those two positions do not easily sit side by side in the conservative coalition. Thus, the rightist movement is contradictory. Is there not something paradoxical about linking all of the feelings of loss and nostalgia to the unpredictability of the market, “in replacing loss by sheer flux”?28 The contradictions between neoconservative and neoliberal elements in the rightist coalition are “solved” through a policy of what Roger Dale has called conservative modernization.29 Such a policy is engaged in simultaneously “freeing” individuals for economic purposes while controlling them for social purposes; indeed, in so far as economic “freedom” increases ­inequalities, it is likely to increase the need for social control. A “small, strong state” limits the range of its activities by transferring to the market, which it defends and legitimizes, as much welfare [and other activities] as possible. In education, the new reliance on competition and choice is not all pervasive; instead, “what is intended is a dual system, polarized between . . . market schools and minimum schools”.30 That is, there will be a relatively less regulated and increasingly privatized sector for the children of the better off. For the rest—and the economic status and racial composition of the people in, say, our urban areas who attend these minimum schools will be thoroughly predictable—the schools will be tightly controlled and policed, and will continue to be underfunded and unlinked to decent paid employment. One of the major effects of the combination of marketization and strong state is “to remove educational policies from public debate.” That is, the choice is left up to individual parents and “the hidden hand of unintended consequences does the rest.” In the process, the very idea of education being part of a public political sphere in which its means and ends are publicly debated atrophies.31 There are major differences between democratic attempts at enhancing people’s rights over the policies and practices of schooling and the neoliberal emphasis on marketization and privatization. The goal of the former is to extend politics, to ‘‘revivify

The Politics of Official Knowledge   201 democratic practice by devising ways of enhancing public discussion, debate, and negotiation.” The former is inherently based on a vision of democracy that is seen as an educative practice. The latter, on the other hand, seeks to contain politics. It wants to reduce all politics to economics, to an ethic of “choice” and “consumption.”32 The world, in essence, becomes a vast supermarket. Enlarging the private sector so that buying and selling—in a word, competition—is the dominant ethic of society involves a set of closely related propositions. It assumes that more individuals are motivated to work harder under these conditions. After all, we “already know” that public servants are inefficient and slothful, while private enterprises are efficient and energetic. It assumes that self-­interest and competitiveness are the engines of creativity. More knowledge, more experimentation, is created and used to alter what we have now. In the process, less waste is created. Supply and demand stay in a kind of equilibrium. A more efficient machine is thus created, one that minimizes administrative costs and ultimately distributes resources more widely.33 This is, of course, not meant simply to privilege the few. However, it is the equivalent of saying that everyone has the right to climb the north face of the Eiger or scale Mount Everest without exception, providing, of course, that one is very good at mountain climbing and has the institutional and financial resources to do it.34 Thus, in a conservative society, access to a society’s private resources (and, remember, the attempt is to make nearly all of society’s resources private) is dependent largely on one’s ability to pay. And this is dependent on one’s being a person of an entrepreneurial or efficiently acquisitive class type. On the other hand, access to society’s public resources (that rapidly decreasing segment) is dependent on need.35 In a conservative society, the former is to be maximized, the latter is to be minimized. However, the conservatism of the conservative alliance does not merely depend, for a large portion of its arguments and policies, on a particular view of human nature—a view of human nature as primarily self-­interested. It has gone further; it has set out to degrade that human nature, to force all people to conform to what at first could only pretend to be true. Unfortunately, it has succeeded in no small measure. Perhaps blinded by their own absolutist and reductive vision of what it means to be human, many of our political “leaders” do not seem to be capable of recognizing what they have done. They have set out, aggressively, to drag down the character of a people,36 while at the same time attacking the poor and the disenfranchised for their supposed lack of values and character. Some of my anger begins to show here. You will forgive me, I trust; but if we cannot get angry about the lives of our children, what can we be angry about?

Curriculum, Testing, and a Common Culture As Whitty reminds us, what is striking about the rightist coalition’s policies is its capacity to connect the emphasis on traditional knowledge and values, authority, standards, and national identity of the neoconservatives and authoritarian populists with the emphasis on the extension of market-­driven principles into all areas of our society, as advocated by the neoliberals.37 Thus, a national curriculum—coupled with rigorous national standards and a system of testing that is performance driven—is able at one and the same time to be aimed at “modernization” of the curriculum and the

202   The Politics of Official Knowledge efficient “production” of better “human capital” and to represent a nostalgic yearning for a romanticized past.38 When tied to a program of market-­driven policies such as voucher and choice plans, such a national system of standards, testing, and curricula— while perhaps internally inconsistent—is an ideal compromise within the rightist coalition. But one could still ask, Won’t a national curriculum coupled with a system of national achievement testing contradict in practice the concomitant emphasis on privatization and school choice? Can one really do both simultaneously? I want to claim here that this apparent contradiction may not be as substantial as it appears. Transferring power from the local level to the center is not necessarily a long-­term aim of powerful elements within the conservative coalition, although for some neoconservatives who favor a strong state when it comes to morality, values, and standards this may indeed be the case. Rather, those powerful elements would prefer to decenter such power altogether and redistribute it according to market forces and thus tacitly disempower those who already have less power, while using a rhetoric of empowering the “consumer.” In part, both a national curriculum and national testing can be seen as “necessary concessions in pursuit of this long term aim.”39 In a time of a loss of government legitimacy and a crisis in educational authority relations, the government must be seen to be doing something about raising educational standards. After all, this is exactly what it promises to offer to “consumers” of education. A national curriculum is crucial here. Its major value does not lie in its supposed encouragement of standardized goals and content and of levels of achievement in what are considered the most important subject areas: a goal that should not be totally dismissed. Instead, the major role of a national curriculum is in providing the framework within which national testing can function. It enables the establishment of a procedure that supposedly can give consumers “quality tags” on schools so that “free market forces” can operate to the fullest extent possible. If we are to have a free market in education with the consumer presented with an attractive range of “choice,” a national curriculum and especially national testing in essence act as a “state watchdog committee” to control the “worst excesses” of the market.40 However, let us be honest to our own history here. Even with the supposed emphasis on portfolios and other more flexible forms of evaluation by some educators, there is no evidence at all to support the hope that what ultimately and permanently will be installed—even if only because of time and expense—will be anything other than a system of mass standardized paper and pencil tests. Yet, we also must be absolutely clear about the social function of such a proposal. A national curriculum may be seen as a device for accountability, to help us establish benchmarks so that parents can evaluate schools. But it also puts into motion a system in which children themselves will be ranked and ordered as never before. One of its primary roles will be to act as “a mechanism for differentiating children more rigidly against fixed norms, the social meanings and derivation of which are not available for scrutiny.”41 Thus, while the proponents of a national curriculum may see it as a means to create social cohesion and to give all of us the capacity to improve our schools by measuring them against “objective” criteria, the effects will be the opposite. The criteria may seem

The Politics of Official Knowledge   203 objective; but the results will not be, given existing differences in resources and in class and race segregation. Rather than leading to cultural and social cohesion, differences between “we” and the “others” will be socially produced even more strongly, and the attendant social antagonisms and cultural and economic destruction will worsen. (This applies also to the current infatuation with outcome-­based education, a new term for older versions of educational control and stratification.) Richard Johnson helps us understand the social processes at work here. This nostalgia for “cohesion” is interesting, but the great delusion is that all pupils—black and white, working class, poor, and middle-­class, boys and girls— will receive the curriculum in the same way. Actually, it will be read in different ways, according to how pupils are placed in social relationships and culture. A common curriculum, in a heterogeneous society, is not a recipe for “cohesion”, but for resistance and the renewal of divisions. Since it always rests on cultural foundations of its own, it will put pupils in their places, not according to “ability”, but according to how their cultural communities rank along the criteria taken as the “standard”. A curriculum which does not “explain itself ”, is not ironical or self-­critical, will always have this effect.42 These are significant points, especially the call for all curricula to explain themselves. In complex societies like our own, ones riven with differential power, the only kind of “cohesion” that is possible is one in which we overtly recognize differences and ­inequalities. The curriculum then should not be presented as “objective.” Rather, it must constantly subjectify itself. That is, it must “acknowledge its own roots” in the culture, history, and social interests out of which it arose. Accordingly, it will homo­ genize neither this culture, history, and social interest, nor the students. The “same treatment” by sex, race and ethnicity, or class is not the same at all. A democratic curriculum and pedagogy must begin with a recognition of “the different social positionings and cultural repertoires in the classrooms, and the power relations between them.” Thus, if we are concerned with “really equal treatment”—as I think we must be—we must base a curriculum on a recognition of those differences that empower and depower our students in identifiable ways.43 Foucault reminded us that if you want to understand how power works, look at the margins, look at the knowledge, self-­understandings, and struggles of those whom powerful groups in this society have cast off as “the other.”44 The New Right and its allies have created entire groups as these “others”—people of color, women who refuse to accept external control of their lives and bodies, gays and lesbians, the poor, and, as I know from my own biography, the vibrant culture of working class life (and the list could go on). It is in the recognition of these differences that curriculum dialogue can go on. Such a national dialogue begins with the concrete and public exploration of “how we are differently positioned in society and culture.” What the New Right embargoes—the knowledge of the margins, of how culture and power are indissolubly linked—becomes a set of indispensable resources here.45 The proposed national curriculum, of course, would recognize some of these differences. But, as Linda Christian-­Smith and I argue in The Politics of the Textbook, the national curriculum serves both to partly acknowledge difference and at the same time

204   The Politics of Official Knowledge to recuperate it back within the supposed consensus that exists about what we should teach.46 It is part of an attempt to recreate hegemonic power that has been partly fractured by social movements. The very idea of a common culture upon which a national curriculum—as defined by neoconservatives—is to be built is itself a form of cultural politics. In the immense linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity that makes up the constant creativity and flux in which we live, it is the cultural policy of the Right to “override” such diversity. Thinking it is reinstituting a common culture, instead it is inventing one, in much the same way as E. D. Hirsch has tried to do in his self-­parody of what it means to be literate.47 A uniform culture never truly existed in the United States, only a selective version, an invented tradition that is reinstalled (though in different forms) in times of economic crisis and a crisis in authority relations, both of which threaten the hege­ mony of the culturally and economically dominant. The expansion of voices in the curriculum and the vehement responses of the Right become crucial here. Multicultural and antiracist curricula present challenges to the program of the New Right, challenges that go to the core of their vision. A largely monocultural national curriculum (which deals with diversity by centering the always ideological “we” and usually then simply mentioning “the contributions” of people of color, women, and “others,” or by creating a false logic of equivalence in which “we are all immigrants”) emphasizes the maintenance of existing hierarchies of what counts as official knowledge, the revivifying of traditional “Western” standards and values, the return to a “disciplined” (and one could say largely masculinist) pedagogy, and so on. A threat to any of these is also a threat to the entire world view of the Right.48 The idea of a “common culture”—in the guise of the romanticized Western tradition of the neoconservatives (or even as expressed in the longings of some socialists)— does not give enough thought, then, to the immense cultural heterogeneity of a society that draws its cultural traditions from all over the world. The task of defending public education as public, as deserving of widespread support “across an extremely diverse and deeply divided people, involves a lot more than restoration.”49 The debate in England is similar. A national curriculum is seen by the Right as essential to prevent relativism. For most of its proponents, a common curriculum basically must transmit both the “common culture” and the high culture that has grown out of it. Anything else will result in incoherence, no culture, merely a “void.” Thus, a national culture is “defined in exclusive, nostalgic, and frequently racist terms.”50 Richard Johnson’s analysis of this process documents its social logic. In formulations like these, culture is thought of as a homogeneous way of life or tradition, not as a sphere of difference, relationships, or power. No recognition is given to the real diversity of social orientations and cultures within a given nation-­ state or people. Yet a selective version of a national culture is installed as an absolute condition for any social identity at all. The borrowing, mixing and fusion of elements from different cultural systems, a commonplace everyday practice in societies like [ours], is unthinkable within this framework, or is seen as a kind of cultural misrule that will produce nothing more than a void. So the “choices” are between . . . a national culture or no culture at all.51

The Politics of Official Knowledge   205 The racial subtext here is perhaps below the surface, but is still present in significant ways.52 There are many more things that could be said. However, one thing is perfectly clear: The national curriculum is a mechanism for the political control of knowledge.53 In order to fully understand this, we must recognize its underlying logic of false consensus. Once established, there will be little chance of turning back. It may be modified by the conflicts that its content generates, but it is in its very establishment that its politics lies. Once established, it undoubtedly will harden as it becomes linked to a massive system of national testing. When this is connected to the other parts of the rightist agenda—marketization and privatization—there is sufficient reason to give us pause, especially given the increasingly powerful conservative gains at local, regional, and state levels.

Who Benefits? One final question remains, one that I hinted at previously. Since leadership in such efforts to “reform” our educational system and its curriculum, teaching, and evaluative policies and practices is largely exercised by the rightist coalition, we need always to ask, “Whose reforms are these?” and “Who benefits?” This is indeed reform on the cheap. A system of national curricula and national testing cannot help but ratify and exacerbate gender, race, and class differences in the absence of sufficient resources both human and material. Thus, when the fiscal crisis in most of our urban areas is so severe that classes are being held in gymnasiums and hallways, when many schools do not have enough funds to stay open for the full 180 days a year, when buildings are literally disintegrating before our very eyes,54 when in some cities three classrooms must share one set of textbooks at the elementary level,55—and I could go on—it is simply a flight of fantasy to assume that more standardized testing and national curriculum guidelines are the answer. As shall be demonstrated in Chapter 4, with the destruction of the economic infrastructure of these same cities through capital flight, with youth unemployment at nearly 75% in many of them, with almost nonexistent health care, and with lives that are often devoid of hope for meaningful mobility because of what simply might best be called the pornography of poverty, to assume that establishing curricular benchmarks based on problematic cultural visions, along with more rigorous testing, will do more than affix labels to poor students in a way that is seemingly more neutral, is to totally misunderstand the situation. It will lead to more blame being attached to students and poor parents and especially to the schools that they attend. It also will be very expensive to institute. Enter voucher and “choice” plans with even wider public approval. Basil Bernstein’s analysis of the complexities of this situation and of its ultimate results is more than a little useful here. As he says, “The pedagogic practices of the new vocationalism [neoliberalism] and those of the old autonomy of knowledge [neoconservatism] represent a conflict between different elitist ideologies, one based on the class hierarchy of the market and the other based on the hierarchy of knowledge and its class supports.”56 Whatever the oppositions between market- and knowledge-­ oriented pedagogic and curricular practices, present racial, gender, and class-­based inequalities are likely to be reproduced.57

206   The Politics of Official Knowledge What Bernstein calls an “autonomous visible pedagogy”—one that relies on overt standards and highly structured models of teaching and evaluation—justifies itself by referring to its intrinsic worthiness. The value of the acquisition of, say, the “Western tradition” lies in its foundational status for “all we hold dear” and in the norms and dispositions that it instills in students. Its arrogance lies in its claim to moral high ground and to the superiority of its culture, its indifference to its own stratification consequences, its conceit in its lack of relation to anything other than itself, its self-­referential abstracted autonomy.58 Its supposed opposite—based on the knowledge, skills, and dispositions “required” by business and industry and with the aim of transforming schooling around market principles—is actually a much more complex ideological construction. It incorporates some of the criticism of the autonomous visible pedagogy . . . criticism of the failure of the urban school, of the passivity and inferior status [given to] parents, of the boredom of . . . pupils and their consequent disruptions of and resistance to irrelevant curricula, of assessment procedures which itemize relative failure rather than the positive strength of the acquirer. But it assimilates these criticisms into a new discourse: a new pedagogic Janus. . . . The explicit commitment to greater choice by parents . . . is not a celebration of participatory democracy, but a thin cover for the old stratification of schools and curricula.59 Are Bernstein’s conclusions correct? Will the combination of national curricula, testing, and privatization actually lead away from democratic processes and outcomes? Here we must look not to Japan (where many people unfortunately have urged us to look) but to Britain, where this combination of proposals is much more advanced. In Britain, there is now considerable evidence that the overall effects of the various market-­oriented policies introduced by the rightist government are not genuine pluralism or the “interrupting [of] traditional modes of social reproduction.” On the contrary, they may instead provide largely “a legitimating gloss for the perpetuation of long-­standing forms of structured inequality.”60 The fact that one of their major effects has been the depowering and deskilling of large numbers of teachers also is not inconsequential.61 Edwards, Gewirtz, and Whitty, who take the argument even further, have come to similar conclusions. In essence, the rightist preoccupation with “escape routes” diverts attention from the effects of such policies on those (probably the majority) who will be left behind.62 Thus, it is indeed possible—actually probable—that market-­oriented approaches in education (even when coupled with a strong state over a system of national curricula and testing) will exacerbate already existing and widespread class and race divisions. “Freedom” and “choice” in the new educational market will be for those who can afford them. “Diversity” in schooling simply will be a more polite word for the condition of educational apartheid.63

The Politics of Official Knowledge   207

Rethinking Common Culture I have been more than a little negative in my appraisal here. I have argued that the politics of official knowledge—in this case surrounding proposals for a national curriculum and national testing—cannot be fully understood in an isolated way. All of this needs to be situated directly in larger ideological dynamics in which we are seeing an attempt by a new hegemonic bloc to transform our very ideas of what education is for. This transformation involves a major shift—one that Dewey would have shuddered at—in which democracy becomes an economic rather than a political concept, and where the idea of the public good withers at its very roots. But perhaps I have been too negative. Perhaps there are good reasons to support national curricula and national testing, even as currently constituted, precisely because of the power of the rightist coalition. It is possible, for example, to argue that only by establishing a national curriculum and national testing can we stop the fragmentation that will accompany the neoliberal portion of the rightist project. Only such a system would protect the very idea of a public school, would protect teachers’ unions (which in a privatized and marketized system would lose much of their power), and would protect poor children and children of color from the vicissitudes of the market. After all, it is the “free market” that created the poverty and destruction of community that they are experiencing in the first place. It is also possible to argue, as Geoff Whitty has in the British case, that the very fact of a national curriculum encourages both the formation of intense public debate about whose knowledge is declared official and the creation of progressive coalitions across a variety of differences against such state-­sponsored definitions of legitimate knowledge.64 It could be the vehicle for the return of the political that the Right so wishes to evacuate from our public discourse and that the efficiency experts wish to make into merely a technical concern. Thus, it is quite possible that the establishment of a national curriculum could have the effect of unifying oppositional and oppressed groups. Given the fragmented nature of progressive educational movements today, and given a system of school financing and governance that forces groups to focus largely on the local or state level, one function of a national curriculum could be the coalescence of groups around a common agenda. A national movement for a more democratic vision of school reform could be the result. In many ways—and I am very serious here—we owe principled conservatives (and there are many) a debt of gratitude in an odd way. It is their realization that curriculum issues are not only about techniques, about how-­tos, that has helped stimulate the current debate. When many women, people of color, and labor organizations (these groups obviously are not mutually exclusive) fought for decades to have society recognize the selective tradition in official knowledge, these movements often (though not always) were silenced, ignored, or recuperated into dominant discourses.65 The power of the Right—in its contradictory attempt to establish a national common culture, to challenge what is now taught, and to make that culture part of a vast supermarket of choices and thus purge cultural politics from our sensibilities—has made it impossible for the politics of official knowledge to be ignored. Should we then support a national curriculum and national testing to keep total privatization and marketization at bay? Under current conditions, I do not think it is

208   The Politics of Official Knowledge worth the risk—not only because of the extensive destructive potential in the long and short run, but also because I think it misconstrues and reifies the issues of a common curriculum and a common culture. Here I must repeat the arguments I made in the second edition of Ideology and Curriculum.66 The current call to “return” to a “common culture” in which all students are to be given the values of a specific group—usually the dominant group—does not in my mind concern a common culture at all. Such an approach hardly scratches the surface of the political and educational issues involved. A common culture can never be the general extension to everyone of what a minority mean and believe. Rather, and crucially, it requires not the stipulation of the facts, concepts, skills, and values that make us all “culturally literate,” but the creation of the conditions necessary for all people to participate in the creation and re-­creation of meanings and values. It requires a democratic process in which all people—not simply those who are the intellectual guardians of the “Western tradition”—can be involved in the deliberation over what is important. It should go without saying that this necessitates the removal of the very real material obstacles—unequal power, wealth, time for reflection—that stand in the way of such participation.67 As Raymond Williams so perceptively put it: The idea of a common culture is in no sense the idea of a simply consenting, and certainly not of a merely conforming society. [It involves] a common determination of meanings by all the people, acting sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups, in a process which has no particular end, and which can never be supposed at any time to have finally realized itself, to have become complete. In this common process, the only absolute will be the keeping of the channels and institutions of communication clear so that all may contribute, and be helped to contribute.68 In speaking of a common culture, then, we should not be talking of something uniform, something to which we all conform. Instead, what we should be asking is “precisely, for that free, contributive and common process of participation in the creation of meanings and values.”69 It is the very blockage of that process in our institutions that must concern all of us. Our current language speaks to how this process is being defined during the conservative restoration. Instead of people who participate in the struggle to build and rebuild our educational, cultural, political, and economic relations, we are defined as consumers (of that “particularly acquisitive class type”). This is truly an extraordinary concept, for it sees people as either stomachs or furnaces. We use and use up. We don’t create. Someone else does that. This is disturbing enough in general, but in education it is truly disabling. Leave it to the guardians of tradition, the efficiency and accountability experts, the holders of “real knowledge,” or to the Christopher Whittles of this world who will build us franchised “schools of choice” for the generation of profit.70 Yet, we leave it to these people at great risk to all of us, but especially to those students who are already economically and culturally disenfranchised by our dominant institutions. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, we live in a society with identifiable winners and losers. In the future, we may say that the losers made poor “consumer choices”

The Politics of Official Knowledge   209 and, well, that’s the way markets operate after all. But is this society really only one vast market? As Whitty reminds us, in a time when so many people have found from their daily experiences that the supposed “grand narratives” of progress are deeply flawed, is it appropriate to return to yet another grand narrative, the market?71 The results of this “narrative” are visible every day in the destruction of our communities and environment, in the increasing racism of society, and in the faces and bodies of our children, who see the future and turn away. Many people are able to dissociate themselves from these realities. There is almost a pathological distancing among the affluent.72 Yet, how can one not be morally outraged at the growing gap between rich and poor, the persistence of hunger and homelessness, the deadly absence of medical care, the degradations of poverty? If this were the (always self-­critical and constantly subjectifying) centerpiece of a national curriculum, perhaps such a curriculum would be worthwhile after all. But then how could it be tested cheaply and efficiently and how could the Right control its ends and means? Until such a time, we can take a rightist slogan made popular in another context and apply it to their educational agenda. What is that slogan? “Just say no.”

Notes   1. Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York: Routledge, 1993).   2. Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York: Routledge, 1988).   3. See Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Volume 3 (New York: Routledge, 1977), and Michael W. Apple, “Social Crisis and Curriculum Accords,” Educational Theory 38 (Spring, 1988), pp. 191–201.   4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 7.   5. Ibid., pp. 5–6.   6. Ibid., p. 2.   7. Geoff Whitty, “Education, Economy and National Culture,” in Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 292.   8. See Apple, Teachers and Texts, and Michael W. Apple and Linda Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook (New York: Routledge, 1990).   9. Ibid. 10. See Chapter 4 in this book. See also Sheldon H. Danziger and Daniel Weinberg, eds., Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn’t (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), and Gary Burtless, ed., A Future of Lousy Jobs? (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1990). 11. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.  W. Norton, 1981). Feminist criticisms of science are essential to this task. See, for example, Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (New York: Routledge, 1989), Sandra Harding and Jean F. Barr, eds., Sex and Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminism and Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and Sandra Harding, Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 12. Marshall S. Smith, Jennifer O’Day, and David K. Cohen, “National Curriculum, American Style: What Might It Look Like?” American Educator 14 (Winter 1990), pp. 10–17, 40–47. 13. Ibid., p. 46. 14. Ibid.

210   The Politics of Official Knowledge 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ted Honderich, Conservatism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), p. 1. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Ibid., p. 15. 20. See Apple, Official Knowledge. 21. I put the word “minority” in quotes here to remind us that the vast majority of the world’s population is composed of persons of color. It would be wholly salutary for our ideas about culture and education to remember this fact. 22. Apple, Official Knowledge. 23. Apple, Teachers and Texts, and Apple, Official Knowledge. 24. Ann Bastian, Norm Fruchter, Marilyn Gittell, Colin Greer, and Kenneth Haskins, Choosing Equality (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 25. See Michael W. Apple, Education and Power (New York: Routledge, 1985). 26. Andy Green, “The Peculiarities of English Education,” in Education Group II, eds., Education Limited (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), p. 27. 27. Allen Hunter, Children in the Service of Conservatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Madison Law School, Institute for Legal Studies, 1988). Neoliberalism actually doesn’t ignore the idea of a strong state, but it wants to limit it to specific areas (e.g., defense of markets). 28. Richard Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” in Education Group II, eds., Education Limited, p. 40. 29. Quoted in Tony Edwards, Sharon Gewirtz, and Geoff Whitty, “Whose Choice of Schools?” in Madeleine Arnot and Len Barton, eds., Voicing Concerns: Sociological Perspectives on Contemporary Educational Reforms (London: Triangle Books, 1992), p. 156. 30. Ibid. The authors are quoting from Roger Dale, “The Thatcherite Project in Education,” Critical Social Policy 9 (no. 3, 1989). 31. “Introduction to Part Three—Alternatives: Public Education and a New Professionalism,” in Education Group II, eds., Education Limited, p. 268. 32. Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” p. 68. 33. Honderich, Conservatism, p. 104. 34. Ibid., pp. 99–100. 35. Ibid., p. 89. 36. Ibid., p. 81. 37. Whitty, “Education, Economy and National Culture,” p. 294. 38. Ibid. 39. Green, “The Peculiarities of English Education,” p. 29. 40. Ibid. I am making a “functional” not necessarily an “intentional” explanation here. See Daniel Liston, Capitalist Schools (New York: Routledge, 1988). For an interesting discussion of how such testing programs may actually work against more democratic efforts at school reform, see Linda Darling-­Hammond, “Bush’s Testing Plan Undercuts School Reforms,” Rethinking Schools 6 (March/April, 1992), p. 18. 41. Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” p. 79. Italics in original. 42. Ibid., pp. 79–80. 43. Ibid., p.  80. See also Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” Harvard Educational Review 59 (August 1989), pp. 297–324. 44. See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 34–75. 45. Richard Johnson, “Ten Theses on a Monday Morning,” in Education Group II, eds., Education Limited, p. 320. 46. See Apple and Christian-­Smith, eds., The Politics of the Textbook, Apple, Official Knowledge, and Whitty, “Education, Economy and National Culture,” p. 290. 47. Johnson, “Ten Theses on a Monday Morning,” p. 319. See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986). 48. Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” p.  51. See also Susan Rose, Keeping Them out of the Hands of Satan (New York: Routledge, 1988).

The Politics of Official Knowledge   211 49. “Preface,” Education Group II, eds., Education Limited, p. x. Speaking of Britain (but much the same can be said about the United States), Homi Bhabha puts the international sense well. “The Western metropole must confront its postcolonial history, told by its influx of postwar migrants and refugees, as an indigenous or native narrative internal to its national identity; and the reason for this is made clear in the stammering, drunken words of Mr. ‘Whiskey’ Sisodia from The Satanic Verses: “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’ ” (Italics in original.) See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 6. 50. Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” p. 71. 51. Ibid. 52. For a more complete analysis of racial subtexts in our policies and practices, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1994), and Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds., Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1993). 53. Johnson, “A New Road to Serfdom?” p. 82. 54. See Apple, Official Knowledge. 55. See the compelling accounts in Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown, 1991). 56. Basil Bernstein, The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: Class, Codes and Control, Volume 4 (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 63. 57. Ibid., p. 64. 58. Ibid., p. 87. 59. Ibid. 60. Geoff Whitty, “Recent Education Reform: Is It a Post-­Modem Phenomenon?” Unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Reproduction, Social Inequality, and Resistance, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, October 1–4, 1991, pp. 20–21. 61. Compare this with the United States experience in Michael W. Apple and Susan Jungck, “You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Teach This Unit,” American Educational Research Journal 27 (Summer 1990), pp. 227–251. 62. Edwards, Gewirtz, and Whitty, “Whose Choice of Schools?” p. 157. 63. Green, “The Peculiarities of English Education,” p.  30. For further discussion of the ideological, social, and economic effects of such “choice” plans, see Stan Karp, “Massachusetts ‘Choice’ Plan Undercuts Poor Districts,” Rethinking Schools 6 (March/April 1992), p. 4, and Robert Lowe, “The Illusion of ‘Choice,’ ” Rethinking Schools 6 (March/April, 1992), pp.  1, 21–23. 64. Geoff Whitty, personal correspondence. Andy Green, in the English context, argues as well that there are merits in having a broadly defined national curriculum, but goes on to say that this makes it even more essential that individual schools have a serious degree of control over its implementation, “not least so that it provides a check against the use of education by the state as a means of promoting a particular ideology.” See Green, “The Peculiarities of English Education,” p. 22. The fact that a large portion of the teachers in England, in essence, went on strike—actively refused to give the national test—provides some support for Whitty’s arguments. 65. See Apple and Christian-­Smith, The Politics of the Textbook. 66. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, pp. xiii–xiv. 67. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (New York: Verso, 1989), pp. 35–36. 68. Ibid., pp. 37–38. 69. Ibid., p. 38. 70. See Apple, Official Knowledge. 71. Whitty, “Education, Economy and National Culture,” p. 22. 72. See the discussion in Kozol, Savage Inequalities.

12 Producing Inequalities Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice

Gritty Materialities For the past two or more decades, even before the new hegemonic bloc I have been describing assumed power, a body of literature in education has grown that has sought to help us think politically about curriculum, teaching, and evaluation. I myself have participated in the building of these critical perspectives. Much of the literature on “critical pedagogies” has been politically and theoretically important and has helped us make a number of gains. However, given what I said in the past two chapters, this literature has some characteristics that limit its effectiveness in mounting serious challenges to what is happening all around us. It too often has not been sufficiently connected to the ways in which the current movement toward conservative modernization both has altered common sense and has transformed the material and ideological conditions surrounding schooling. It, thereby, sometimes becomes a form of what can best be called “romantic possibilitarian” rhetoric, in which the language of possibility substitutes for a consistent tactical analysis of what the balance of forces actually is and what is necessary to change it.1 In this chapter, I examine in even more detail the ways in which the social and cultural terrain of educational policy and discourse has been altered “on the ground” so to speak. I argue that we need to make closer connections between our theoretical and critical discourses on the one hand and the real transformations that are currently shifting educational policies and practices in fundamentally rightist directions on the other. Thus, part of my discussion is conceptual, but part of it appropriately is more empirical than in Chapter 2 in order for me to pull together what is known about the real and material effects of the shift to the right in education. My focus on the “gritty materialities” of these effects is not meant to dismiss the importance of theoretical interventions. Nor is it meant to suggest that dominant discourses should not be constantly interrupted by the creative gains that have emerged from various neo-­Marxist, feminist, postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, queer, disability, environmental, and other communities. Indeed, critical pedagogies require the fundamental interruption of common sense. However, although the construction of new theories and Utopian visions is important, it is equally crucial to base these theories and visions in an unromantic appraisal of the material and discursive terrain that now exists. Common sense is already being radically altered but not in directions that any of us on the left would find comforting.

Producing Inequalities   213 Without an analysis of such transformations and of the balance of forces that have created such discomforting alterations, without an analysis of the tensions, differential relations of power, and contradictions within it, we are left with increasingly elegant new theoretical formulations, but with a less than elegant understanding of the field of social power on which they operate.2

Right Turn In his influential history of curriculum debates, Herbert Kliebard has documented that educational issues have consistently involved major conflicts and compromises among groups with competing visions of “legitimate” knowledge, what counts as “good” teaching and learning, and what is a “just” society.3 That such conflicts have deep roots in conflicting views of racial, class, and gender justice in education and the larger society is ratified in even more critical recent work as well.4 These competing visions have never had equal holds on the imagination of educators or the general citizenry nor have they ever had equal power to effect their visions. Because of this, no analysis of education can be fully serious without placing at its very core a sensitivity to the ongoing struggles that constantly shape the terrain on which education operates. Today is no different from the past. As I argued in Chapter 2, a “new” set of compromises, a new alliance, and new power bloc have been formed that have increasing influence in education and all things social. This power bloc combines multiple fractions of capital who are committed to neoliberal marketized solutions to educational problems, neoconservative intellectuals who want a “return” to higher standards and a “common culture,” authoritarian populist religious fundamentalists who are deeply worried about secularity and the preservation of their own traditions, and particular fractions of the professionally oriented new middle class who are committed to the ideo­logy and techniques of accountability, measurement, and “management.” Although clear tensions and conflicts exist within this alliance, in general its overall aims are to provide the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasing international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticized past of the “ideal” home, family, and school.5 In essence, the new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide its economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; the lowering of people’s expectations for economic security; the “disciplining” of culture and the body; and the popularization of what is clearly a form of Social Darwinist thinking, as the recent popularity of The Bell Curve so obviously and distressingly indicates.6 The seemingly contradictory discourse of competition, markets, and choice, on the one hand, and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national and state testing, and national and statewide curriculum, on the other, has created such a din that it is hard to hear anything else. Even though these seem to embody different tendencies, they actually oddly reinforce each other and help cement conservative educational positions into our daily lives.7

214   Producing Inequalities Although lamentable, the changes that are occurring present an exceptional opportunity for serious critical reflection. In a time of radical social and educational change, it is crucial to document the processes and effects of the various and sometimes contradictory elements of the conservative restoration and of the ways in which they are mediated, compromised with, accepted, used in different ways by different groups for their own purposes, and/or struggled over in the policies and practices of people’s daily educational lives.8 I give a more detailed sense of how this might be happening in current “reforms” such as marketization and national curricula and national testing in this chapter and then extend it in the following one. For those interested in critical educational policies and practices, not to do this means that we act without understanding the shifting relations of power that are constructing and reconstructing the social field of power. Although Gramsci’s saying “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” has a powerful resonance to it and is useful for mobilization and for not losing hope, it would be foolish to substitute rhetorical slogans for the fuller analysis that is undoubtedly required if we are to be successful.

New Markets, Old Traditions Historically, behind a good deal of the New Right’s emerging discursive ensemble was a position that emphasized “a culturalist construction of the nation as a (threatened) haven for white (Christian) traditions and values.”9 This involved the construction of an imagined national past that is at least partly mythologized, and then employing it to castigate the present. Gary McCulloch argues that the nature of the historical images of schooling has changed. Dominant imagery of education as being “safe, domesticated, and progressive” (that is, as leading toward progress and social/personal improvement) has shifted to become “threatening, estranged, and regressive.”10 The past is no longer the source of stability but a mark of failure, disappointment, and loss. This is seen most vividly in the attacks on the “progressive orthodoxy” that supposedly now reigns supreme in classrooms in many nations.11 For example, in England—although much the same is echoed in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere—Michael Jones, the political editor of The Sunday Times, recalls the primary school of his day: Primary school was a happy time for me. About 40 of us sat at fixed wooden desks with ink wells and moved from them only with grudging permission. Teacher sat in a higher desk in front of us and moved only to the blackboard. She smelled of scent and inspired awe.12 The mix of metaphors invoking discipline, scent (visceral and almost “natural”), and awe is fascinating. But he goes on, lamenting the past thirty years of “reform” that transformed primary schools. Speaking of his own children’s experience, Jones says: My children spent their primary years in a showplace school where they were allowed to wander around at will, develop their real individuality and dodge the 3Rs. It was all for the best, we were assured. But it was not.13

Producing Inequalities   215 For Jones, the “dogmatic orthodoxy” of progressive education “had led directly to educational and social decline.” Only the rightist reforms instituted in the 1980s and 1990s could halt and then reverse this decline.14 Only then could the imagined past return. Much the same is being said on this side of the Atlantic. These sentiments are echoed in the public pronouncements of such figures as William Bennett, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Diane Ravitch, and others, all of whom seem to believe that progressivism is now in the dominant position in educational policy and practice and has destroyed a valued past. All of them believe that only by tightening control over curriculum and teaching (and students, of course), restoring “our” lost traditions, making education more disciplined and competitive as they are certain it was in the past—only then can we have effective schools. These figures are joined by others who have similar criticisms, but who instead turn to a different past for a different future. Their past is less that of scent and awe and authority, but one of market “freedom.” For them, nothing can be accomplished—even the restoration of awe and authority—without setting the market loose on schools so as to ensure that only “good” ones survive. We should understand that these policies are radical transformations. If they had come from the other side of the political spectrum, they would have been ridiculed in many ways, given the ideological tendencies in our nations. Furthermore, not only are these policies based on a romanticized pastoral past, these reforms have not been notable for their grounding in research findings. Indeed, when research has been used, it has often either served as a rhetoric of justification for preconceived beliefs about the supposed efficacy of markets or regimes of tight accountability or they have been based—as in the case of Chubb and Moe’s much publicized work on marketization—on quite flawed research.15 Yet, no matter how radical some of these proposed “reforms” are and no matter how weak the empirical basis of their support, they have now redefined the terrain of debate of all things educational. After years of conservative attacks and mobilizations, it has become clear that “ideas that were once deemed fanciful, unworkable—or just plain extreme” are now increasingly being seen as common sense.16 Tactically, the reconstruction of common sense that has been accomplished has proven to be extremely effective. For example, clear discursive strategies are being employed here, ones that are characterized by “plain speaking” and speaking in a language that “everyone can understand.” (I do not wish to be wholly negative about this. The importance of these things is something many “progressive” educators, including many writers on critical pedagogy, have yet to understand.)17 These strategies also involve not only presenting one’s own position as “common sense,” but also usually tacitly implying that there is something of a conspiracy among one’s opponents to deny the truth or to say only that which is “fashionable.”18 As Gillborn notes, This is a powerful technique. First, it assumes that there are no genuine arguments against the chosen position; any opposing views are thereby positioned as false, insincere or self-­serving. Second, the technique presents the speaker as someone brave or honest enough to speak the (previously) unspeakable. Hence, the moral high ground is assumed and opponents are further denigrated.19 It is hard to miss these characteristics in some of the conservative literature such as Herrnstein and Murray’s publicizing of the unthinkable “truth” about genetics and

216   Producing Inequalities intelligence or E. D. Hirsch’s latest “tough” discussion of the destruction of “serious” schooling by progressive educators.20

Markets and Performance Let us take as an example of the ways in which all of these arguments operate one element of conservative modernization—the neoliberal claim that the invisible hand of the market will inexorably lead to better schools. As Roger Dale reminds us, “the market” acts as a metaphor rather than an explicit guide for action. It is not denotative, but connotative. Thus, it must itself be “marketed” to those who will exist in it and live with its effects.21 Markets are marketed, are made legitimate, by a depoliticizing strategy. They are said to be natural and neutral, and governed by effort and merit. And those opposed to them are by definition, hence, also opposed to effort and merit. Markets, as well, are supposedly less subject to political interference and the weight of bureaucratic procedures. Plus, they are grounded in the rational choices of individual actors.22 Thus, markets and the guarantee of rewards for effort and merit are to be coupled together to produce “neutral,” yet positive, results. Mechanisms, hence, must be put into place that give evidence of entrepreneurial efficiency and effectiveness. This coupling of markets and mechanisms for the generation of evidence of performance is exactly what has occurred. Whether it works is open to question. Indeed, as I shall show shortly, in practice neoliberal policies involving market “solutions” may actually serve to reproduce—not subvert—traditional hierarchies of class and race. Perhaps this should give us reason to pause?23 Thus, rather than taking neoliberal claims at face value, we should want to ask about their hidden effects that are too often invisible in the rhetoric and metaphors of their proponents. I shall select a number of issues that have been given less attention than they deserve, but on which there is now significant research. The English experience is apposite here, especially since proponents of the market such as Chubb and Moe rely so heavily on it24 and because that is where the tendencies I analyze are most advanced. In England, the 1993 Education Act documents the state’s commitment to marketization. Governing bodies of local educational authorities (LEAs) were mandated to formally consider “going GM” (that is, opting out of the local school system’s control and entering into the competitive market) every year.25 Thus, the weight of the state stood behind the press toward neoliberal reforms there.26 Yet, rather than leading to curriculum responsiveness and diversification, the competitive market has not created much that is different from the traditional models so firmly entrenched in schools today.27 Nor has it radically altered the relations of in­equality that characterize schooling. In their own extensive analyses of the effects of marketized reforms “on the ground,” Ball and his colleagues point to some of the reasons why we need to be quite cautious here. As they document, in these situations educational principles and values are often compromised such that commercial issues become more important in curriculum design and resource allocation.28 For instance, the coupling of markets with the demand for and publication of performance indicators such as “examination league tables” in England has meant that schools are increasingly looking for ways to attract “motivated” parents with “able” children. In this way, schools are able to enhance their

Producing Inequalities   217 relative position in local systems of competition. This represents a subtle but crucial shift in emphasis—one that is not openly discussed as often as it should be—from student needs to student performance and from what the school does for the student to what the student does for the school. This is also accompanied too uncomfortably often by a shift of resources away from students who are labeled as having special needs or learning difficulties, with some of these needed resources now being shifted to marketing and public relations. “Special needs” students not only are expensive but also deflate test scores on those all important league tables. Not only does this make it difficult to “manage public impressions,” but it also makes it difficult to attract the “best” and most academically talented teachers.29 The entire enterprise does, however, establish a new metric and a new set of goals based on a constant striving to win the market game. What this means is of considerable import, not only in terms of its effects on daily school life but in the ways all of this signifies a transformation of what counts as a good society and a responsible citizen. Let me say something about this generally. I noted earlier that behind all educational proposals are visions of a just society and a good student. The neoliberal reforms I have been discussing construct this in a particular way. While the defining characteristic of neoliberalism is largely based on the central tenets of classical liberalism, in particular classic economic liberalism, there are crucial differences between classical liberalism and neoliberalism. These differences are absolutely essential in understanding the politics of education and the transformations education is currently undergoing. Mark Olssen clearly details these differences in the following passage. It is worth quoting in its entirety. Whereas classical liberalism represents a negative conception of state power in that the individual was to be taken as an object to be freed from the interventions of the state, neo-­liberalism has come to represent a positive conception of the state’s role in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for its operation. In classical liberalism, the individual is characterized as having an autonomous human nature and can practice freedom. In neo-­liberalism the state seeks to create an individual who is an enterprising and competitive entrepreneur. In the classical model the theoretical aim of the state was to limit and minimize its role based on postulates which included universal egoism (the self-­interested individual); invisible hand theory which dictated that the interests of the individual were also the interests of the society as a whole; and the political maxim of laissez-­faire. In the shift from classical liberalism to neo-­liberalism, then, there is a further element added, for such a shift involves a change in subject position from “homo economicus,” who naturally behaves out of self-­interest and is relatively detached from the state, to “manipulatable man,” who is created by the state and who is continually encouraged to be “perpetually responsive.” It is not that the conception of the self-­interested subject is replaced or done away with by the new ideals of “neo-­liberalism,” but that in an age of universal welfare, the perceived possibilities of slothful indolence create necessities for new forms of vigilance, surveillance, “performance appraisal” and of forms of control generally. In this model the state has taken it upon itself to keep us all up to the mark. The state will see to it that each one

218   Producing Inequalities makes a “continual enterprise of ourselves” . . . in what seems to be a process of “governing without governing.”30 The results of Ball and his colleagues’ research document how the state does indeed do this, enhancing that odd combination of marketized individualism and control through constant and comparative public assessment. Widely publicized league tables determine one’s relative value in the educational marketplace. Only those schools with rising performance indicators are worthy. And only those students who can “make a continual enterprise of themselves” can keep such schools going in the “correct” direction, a discussion to which I return shortly. Yet, although these issues are important, they fail to fully illuminate some of the other mechanisms through which differential effects are produced by neoliberal reforms. Here, class issues come to the fore in ways that Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz make clear. Middle-­class parents are clearly the most advantaged in this kind of cultural assemblage, and not only as we saw because schools seek them out. Middle-­class parents have become quite skilled, in general, in exploiting market mechanisms in education and in bringing their social, economic, and cultural capital to bear on them.31 “Middle-­ class parents are more likely to have the knowledge, skills and contacts to decode and manipulate what are increasingly complex and deregulated systems of choice and recruitment. The more deregulation, the more possibility of informal procedures being employed. The middle class also, on the whole, are more able to move their children around the system.”32 As I argue in more detail later on, both because class and race intersect and interact in complex ways and because marketized systems in education often expressly have their conscious and unconscious raison d’être in a fear of “the Other” and these often are hidden expressions of a racialization of educational policy, the differential results will “naturally” be decidedly raced as well as classed.33 Economic and social capital can be converted into cultural capital in various ways. In marketized plans, more affluent parents often have more flexible hours and can visit multiple schools. They have cars—often more than one—and can afford driving their children across town to attend a “better” school. They can as well provide the hidden cultural resources such as camps and after-­school programs (dance, music, computer classes, etc.) that give their children an “ease,” a “style,” that seems “natural” and acts as a set of cultural resources. Their previous stock of social and cultural capital—who they know, their “comfort” in social encounters with educational officials—is an unseen but powerful storehouse of resources. Thus, more affluent parents are more likely to have the informal knowledge and skill—what Bourdieu would call the habitus34—to be able to decode and use marketized forms to their own benefit. This sense of what might be called “confidence”—which is itself the result of past choices that tacitly but no less powerfully depend on the economic resources to actually have had the ability to make economic choices—is the unseen capital that underpins their ability to negotiate marketized forms and “work the system” through sets of informal cultural rules.35 Of course, it needs to be said that working-­class, poor, and/or immigrant parents are not skill-­less in this regard, by any means. (After all, it requires an immense amount of skill, courage, and social and cultural resources to survive under exploitative and depressing material conditions. Thus, collective bonds, informal networks and

Producing Inequalities   219 contacts, and an ability to work the system are developed in quite nuanced, intelligent, and often impressive ways here.)36 However, the match between the historically grounded habitus expected in schools and in its actors and those of more affluent parents, combined with the material resources available to more affluent parents, usually leads to a successful conversion of economic and social capital into cultural capital.37 And this is exactly what is happening in England and elsewhere. These claims both about what is happening inside of schools and about larger sets of power relations are supported by even more recent synthetic analyses of the overall results of marketized models. This research on the effects of the tense but still effective combination of neoliberal and neoconservative policies examines the tendencies internationally by comparing what has happened in a number of nations—for example, the United States, England and Wales, Australia, and New Zealand—where this combination has been increasingly powerful. The results confirm the arguments I have made here. Let me rehearse some of the most significant and disturbing findings of such research. It is unfortunately all too usual that the most widely used measures of the “success” of school reforms are the results of standardized achievement tests. This simply will not do. We need to constantly ask what reforms do to schools as a whole and to each of their participants, including teachers, students, administrators, community members, local activists, and so on. To take one set of examples, as marketized “self-­ managing” schools grow in many nations, the role of the school principal is radically transformed. More, not less, power is actually consolidated within an administrative structure. More time and energy is spent on maintaining or enhancing a public image of a “good school” and less time and energy is spent on pedagogic and curricular substance. At the same time, teachers seem to be experiencing not increased autonomy and professionalism, but intensification.38 And, oddly, as noted before, schools themselves become more similar, and more committed, to standard, traditional, whole-­class methods of teaching and a standard and traditional (and often monocultural) curriculum.39 Only directing our attention to test scores would cause us to miss some truly profound transformations, many of which we may find disquieting. One of the reasons these broader effects are so often produced is that in all too many countries, neoliberal visions of quasi markets are usually accompanied by neoconservative pressure to regulate content and behavior through such things as national curricula, national standards, and national systems of assessment. The combination is historically contingent; that is, it is not absolutely necessary that the two emphases are combined. But neoliberalism has characteristics that make it more likely that an emphasis on the weak state and a faith in markets will cohere with an emphasis on the strong state and a commitment to regulating knowledge, values, and the body. This is partly the case because of the increasing power of the “evaluative state” and the members of the managerial and professional middle class who tend to populate it. This signifies what initially may seem to be contradictory tendencies. At the same time as the state appears to be devolving power to individuals and autonomous institutions that are themselves increasingly competing in a market, the state remains strong in key areas.40 As I claimed earlier, one of the key differences between classical liberalism and its faith in “enterprising individuals” in a market and current forms of neoliberalism is the latter’s commitment to a regulatory state. Neoliberalism does indeed demand the

220   Producing Inequalities constant production of evidence that one is in fact “making an enterprise of oneself.”41 Thus, under these conditions not only does education become a marketable commodity like bread and cars in which the values, procedures, and metaphors of business dominate, but its results must be reducible to standardized “performance indicators.”42 This is ideally suited to the task of providing a mechanism for the neoconservative attempts to specify what knowledge, values, and behaviors should be standardized and officially defined as “legitimate,” a point I expand on in the next section of this chapter. In essence, we are witnessing a process in which the state shifts the blame for the very evident inequalities in access and outcome it has promised to reduce, from itself onto individual schools, parents, and children. This is, of course, also part of a larger process in which dominant economic groups shift the blame for the massive and unequal effects of their own misguided decisions from themselves onto the state. The state is then faced with a very real crisis in legitimacy. Given this, we should not be at all surprised that the state will then seek to export this crisis outside itself.43 Of course, the state is not only classed but inherently sex/gendered and raced as well.44 This is evident in Whitty, Power, and Halpin’s arguments. They point to the gendered nature of the ways in which the management of schools is thought about, as “masculinist” business models become increasingly dominant.45 Although there is a danger of these claims degenerating into reductive and essentializing arguments, there is a good deal of insight here. They do cohere with the work of other scholars inside and outside of education who recognize that the ways in which our very definitions of public and private, of what knowledge is of most worth, and of how institutions should be thought about and run are fully implicated in the gendered nature of this society.46 These broad ideological effects—for example, enabling a coalition between neoliberals and neoconservatives to be formed; expanding the discourses and practices of new middle-­class managerialism; the masculinization of theories, policies, and management talk—are of considerable import and make it harder to change common sense in more critical directions. Other, more proximate, effects inside schools are equally striking. For instance, even though principals seem to have more local power in these supposedly decentralized schools, because of the cementing in of neoconservative policies principals “are increasingly forced into a position in which they have to demonstrate performance along centrally prescribed curricula in a context in which they have diminishing control.”47 Because of the intensification that I mentioned before, both principals and teachers experience considerably heavier workloads and ever-­escalating demands for accountability, a never-­ending schedule of meetings, and in many cases a growing scarcity of resources both emotional and physical.48 Furthermore, as in the research in England, in nearly all of the countries studied the market did not encourage diversity in curriculum, pedagogy, organization, clientele, or even image. It instead consistently devalued alternatives and increased the power of dominant models. Of equal significance, it also consistently exacerbated differences in access and outcome based on race, ethnicity, and class.49 The return to “traditionalism” led to a number of things. It delegitimated more critical models of teaching and learning, a point that is crucial to recognize in any attempt to think through the possibilities of cultural struggles and critical pedagogies in schools. It both reintroduced restratification within the school and lessened the possibility that

Producing Inequalities   221 de-­tracking would occur. More emphasis was given to “gifted” children and “fast track” classes, whereas students who were seen as less academically able were therefore “less attractive.” In England, the extent of this was nowhere more visible than in the alarming rate of students being excluded from schools. Much of this was caused by the intense pressure to constantly demonstrate higher achievement rates. This was especially powerful in marketized contexts in which the “main driving force appeared to be commercial rather than educational.”50 In their own analysis of these worrisome and more hidden results, Whitty, Power, and Halpin and others demonstrate that among the dangerous effects of quasi markets are the ways in which schools that wish to maintain or enhance their market position engage in “cream-­skimming,” ensuring that particular kinds of students with particular characteristics are accepted and particular kinds of students are found wanting. For some schools, stereotypes were reproduced in that girls were seen as more valuable, as were students from some Asian communities. Afro-­Caribbean children were often clear losers in this situation.51 So far I have focused largely on England. Yet, as I mentioned in my introductory points, these movements are truly global. Their logics have spread rapidly to many nations, with results that tend to mirror those I have discussed so far. The case of New Zealand is useful here, especially because a large percentage of the population of New Zealand is multiethnic, and the nation has a history of racial tensions and inequalities. Furthermore, the move toward New Right policies occurred faster there than elsewhere. In essence, New Zealand became the laboratory for many of the policies I am analyzing. In their exceptional study, based in large part on a conceptual apparatus influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, Lauder and Hughes document that educational markets seem to lead to an overall decline in educational standards. Paradoxically, they have a negative, not a positive, effect on the performance of schools with large working-­class and minority populations. In essence, they “trade off the opportunities of less privileged children to those already privileged.”52 The combination of neoliberal policies of marketization and the neoconservative emphasis on “tougher standards,” about which I say more in the next section, creates an even more dangerous set of conditions. Lauder and Hughes’s analysis confirms the conceptual and empirical arguments of Ball, Brown, and others that markets in education are not only responses by capital to reduce both the sphere of the state and of public control. They are also part of an attempt by the middle class to alter the rules of competition in education in light of the increased insecurities their children face. “By changing the process of selection to schools, middle class parents can raise the stakes in creating stronger mechanisms of exclusion for blue collar and post-­colonial peoples in their struggle for equality of opportunity.”53 The results from New Zealand not only mirror what was found elsewhere, but also demonstrate that the further one’s practices follow the logics of action embodied in marketizing principles, the worse the situation tends to get. Markets systematically privilege families with higher socioeconomic status (SES) through their knowledge and material resources. These are the families who are most likely to exercise choice. Rather than giving large numbers of students who are working class, poor, or of color the ability to exit, it is largely higher SES families who exit from public schools and schools with mixed populations. In a situation of increased competition, this in turn produces

222   Producing Inequalities a spiral of decline in which schools populated by poorer students and students of color are again systematically disadvantaged and schools with higher SES and higher white populations are able to insulate themselves from the effects of market competition.54 “White flight” then enhances the relative status of those schools already advantaged by larger economic forces; schooling for the “Other” becomes even more polarized and continues a downward spiral.55 Having said this, however, we need to be cautious not to ignore historical specificities. Social movements, existing ideological formations, and institutions in civil society and the state may provide some support for countervailing logics. In some cases, in those nations with stronger and more extensive histories of social democratic policies and visions of collective positive freedoms, the neoliberal emphasis on the market has been significantly mediated. Hence, as Petter Aasen has demonstrated in Norway and Sweden, for instance, privatizing initiatives in education have had to cope with a greater collective commitment than in, say, the United States, England, and New Zealand.56 However, these commitments partly rest on class relations. They are weakened when racial dynamics enter in. Thus, for example, the sense of “everyone being the same” and hence being all subject to similar collective sensibilities is challenged by the growth of immigrant populations from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Greater sympathy for marketized forms may arise once the commonly understood assumptions of what it means to be, say, Norwegian or Swedish are interrupted by populations of color who now claim the status of national citizenship. For this reason, it may be the case that the collective sensibilities that provide support for less market oriented policies are based on an unacknowledged racial contract that underpins the ideological foundations of a national “imagined community.”57 This, then, may also generate support for neoconservative policies, not because of neoliberalism’s commitment to “perpetual responsiveness” but, rather, as a form of cultural restoration, as a way of reestablishing an imagined past when “we were all one.” Because of this, it is important that any analysis of the current play of forces surrounding conservative modernization is aware of the fact that not only are such movements in constant motion, but once again we need to remember that they have a multitude of intersecting and contradictory dynamics including not only class but race and gender as well.58 Most of the data I have drawn on come from schools outside the United States, although they should make us stop dead in our tracks and give some very serious thought to whether we want to proceed with similar policies here. Yet the United States still sits at the center of much of the discussion in this literature. For example, charter schools and their equivalents in the United States and England are also put under critical scrutiny. In both places, although we need to be careful not to overstate this, they tend to attract parents who live and work in relatively privileged communities. Here, too, “it would appear that any new opportunities are being colonized by the already advantaged, rather than the ‘losers’ identified by Chubb and Moe.”59 In the process, this critical research suggests that there are hidden similarities between advocates of school effectiveness research and those committed to neoliberal “reforms.” Both tend to ignore the fact that external characteristics of schools such as poverty, political and economic power, and so on consistently account for much more of the variation in school performance than things like organizational features or those characteristics that supposedly guarantee an “effective school.”60

Producing Inequalities   223 The overall conclusions are clear. “[In] current circumstances choice is as likely to reinforce hierarchies as to improve educational opportunities and the overall quality of schooling.”61 As Whitty, Power, and Halpin put it in their arguments against those who believe that what we are witnessing in the emergence of “choice” programs is the postmodern celebration of difference: There is a growing body of empirical evidence that, rather than benefiting the disadvantaged, the emphasis on parental choice and school autonomy is further disadvantaging those least able to compete in the market. . . . For most disadvantaged groups, as opposed to the few individuals who escape from schools at the bottom of the status hierarchy, the new arrangements seem to be just a more sophisticated way of reproducing traditional distinctions between different types of school and the people who attend them.62 All of this critical information gives us ample reason to repeat Henig’s insightful argument I quoted in the previous chapter that “the sad irony of the current education-­ reform movement is that, through over-­identification with school-­choice proposals rooted in market-­based ideas, the healthy impulse to consider radical reforms to address social problems may be channeled into initiatives that further erode the potential for collective deliberation and collective response.”63 This is not to dismiss either the possibility or necessity of school reform. However, we need to take seriously the probability that only by focusing on the exogenous socioeconomic features, not simply the organizational features, of “successful” schools can all schools succeed. Eliminating poverty through greater income parity, establishing effective and much more equal health and housing programs, and positively refusing to continue the hidden and not-­so-hidden politics of racial exclusion and degradation that so clearly still characterize daily life in many nations (and in which marketized plans need to be seen as partly a structure to avoid the body and culture of the Other)—only by tackling these issues together can substantive progress be made.64 Unless discussions of critical pedagogy are themselves grounded in a recognition of these realities, they too may fall into the trap of assuming that schools can do it alone. These empirical findings are made more understandable in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the relative weight given to cultural capital as part of mobility strategies today.65 The rise in importance of cultural capital infiltrates all institutions in such a way that there is a relative movement away from the direct reproduction of class privilege (where power is transmitted largely within families through economic property) to school-­mediated forms of class privilege. Here, “the bequeathal of privilege is simultaneously effectuated and transfigured by the intercession of educational institutions.”66 This is not a conspiracy; it is not “conscious” in the ways we normally use that concept. Rather, it is the result of a long chain of relatively autonomous connections between differentially accumulated economic, social, and cultural capital operating at the level of daily events as we make our respective ways in the world, including as we saw in the world of school choice. Thus, although not taking an unyieldingly determinist position, Bourdieu argues that a class habitus tends to reproduce the conditions of its own reproduction “unconsciously.” It does this by producing a relatively coherent and systematically characteristic

224   Producing Inequalities set of seemingly natural and unconscious strategies—in essence, ways of understanding and acting on the world that act as forms of cultural capital that can be and are employed to protect and enhance one’s status in a social field of power. He aptly compares this similarity of habitus across class actors to handwriting: Just as the acquired disposition we call “handwriting,” that is a particular way of forming letters, always produces the same “writing”—that is, graphic lines that despite differences in size, matter, and color related to writing surface (sheet of paper or blackboard) and implement (pencil, pen, or chalk), that is despite differences in vehicles for the action, have an immediately recognizable affinity of style or a family resemblance—the practices of a single agent, or, more broadly, the practices of all agents endowed with similar habitus, owe the affinity of style that makes each a metaphor for the others to the fact that they are the products of the implementation in different fields of the same schemata of perception, thought, and action.67 This very connection of habitus across fields of power—the ease of bringing one’s economic, social, and cultural resources to bear on “markets”—enables a comfort between markets and self that characterizes the middle-­class actor here. This constantly produces differential effects. These effects are not neutral, no matter what the advocates of neoliberalism suggest. Rather, they are themselves the results of a particular kind of morality. Unlike the conditions of what might best be called “thick morality” where principles of the common good are the ethical basis for adjudicating policies and practices, markets are grounded in aggregative principles. They are constituted out of the sum of individual goods and choices. “Founded on individual and property rights that enable citizens to address problems of interdependence via exchange,” they offer a prime example of “thin morality” by generating both hierarchy and division based on competitive individualism.68 And in this competition, the general outline of the winners and losers has been identified empirically.

National Standards, National Curriculum, and National Testing I showed in the previous section that there are connections between at least two dynamics operating in neoliberal reforms, “free” markets and increased surveillance. This can be seen in the fact that in many contexts, marketization has been accompan­ ied by a set of particular policies for “producers,” for those professionals working within education. These policies have been strongly regulatory and have been quite instrumental in reconstituting common sense. As in the case of the linkage between national tests and performance indicators published as league tables, they have been organized around a concern for external supervision, regulation, and external judgment of performance69 and have increasingly been colonized by parents who possess what is seen as “appropriate” economic, social, and cultural capital. This concern for external supervision and regulation is not only connected with a strong mistrust of “producers” (e.g., teachers) and to the need for ensuring that people continually make enterprises out of themselves. It is also clearly linked both to the neoconservative sense of a need to “return” to a lost past of high standards, discipline, awe, and “real”

Producing Inequalities   225 knowledge and to the professional middle class’ own ability to carve out a sphere of authority within the state for its own commitment to management techniques and efficiency. The focus on efficient management plays a prime role here, one that many neoliberals and neoconservatives alike find useful. A shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and “professionals.” In essence, the move toward a small strong state that is increasingly guided by market needs seems inevitably to bring with it reduced professional power and status.70 Man­ agerialism takes center stage here. Managerialism is largely charged with “bringing about the cultural transformation that shifts professional identities in order to make them more responsive to client demand and external judgement.” It aims to justify and to have people internalize fundamental alterations in professional practices. It both harnesses energy and discourages dissent.71 There is no necessary contradiction between a general set of marketizing and deregulating interests and processes—such as voucher and choice plans—and a set of enhanced regulatory processes—such as plans for national or state standards, curricula, and testing.72 “The regulatory form permits the state to maintain ‘steerage’ over the aims and processes of education from within the market mechanism.”73 Such “steerage at a distance” has often been vested in such things as national standards, national curricula, and national testing. Forms of all of these are being pushed for in the United States both at national and state levels currently and are the subject of considerable controversy, some of which cuts across ideological lines and shows some of the tensions within the different elements contained under the umbrella of conservative modernization. I have argued that paradoxically a national curriculum and especially a national testing program are the first and most essential steps toward increased marketization. They actually provide the mechanisms for comparative data that “consumers” need to make markets work as markets.74 Absent these mechanisms, there is no comparative base of information for “choice.” Yet we do not have to argue about these regulatory forms in a vacuum. Like the neoliberal markets I discussed in the previous section, they too have been instituted in England; and, once again, important research is available that can and must make us duly cautious in going down this path. One might want to claim that a set of national or state standards, national or state curricula, and national or state tests would provide the conditions for thick morality. After all, such regulatory reforms are supposedly based on shared values and common sentiments that also create social spaces in which common issues of concern can be debated and made subject to moral interrogation.75 Yet what counts as the “common,” and how and by whom it is actually determined, is rather more thin than thick. Although the national curriculum now so solidly in place in England and Wales is clearly prescriptive, it has not always proven to be the kind of straitjacket it has often been made out to be. As several researchers have documented, it is not only possible that policies and legislative mandates are interpreted and adapted, but it seems inevit­ able. Thus, the national curriculum is “not so much being ‘implemented’ in schools as being ‘recreated,’ not so much ‘reproduced,’ as ‘produced.’ ”76 In general, it is nearly a truism that there is no simplistic linear model of policy formation, distribution, and implementation. Complex mediations always occur at each level of the process. A complex politics goes on within each group and between these

226   Producing Inequalities groups and external forces in the formulation of policy, in its being written up as a legislative mandate, in its distribution, and in its reception at the level of practice.77 Thus, the state may legislate changes in curriculum, evaluation, or policy (which is itself produced through conflict, compromise, and political maneuvering), but policy writers and curriculum writers may be unable to control the meanings and implementations of their texts. All texts are “leaky” documents. They are subject to “recontextualization” at every stage of the process.78 However, this general principle may be just a bit too romantic. None of this occurs on a level playing field. As with market plans, there are very real differences in power in one’s ability to influence, mediate, transform, or reject a policy or a regulatory process. Granted, it is important to recognize that a “state control model”—with its assumption of top-­down linearity—is much too simplistic and that the possibility of human agency and influence is always there. However, having said this, this should not imply that such agency and influence will be powerful.79 The case of national curriculum and national testing in England and Wales documents the tensions in these two accounts. The national curriculum that was first legislated and then imposed there was indeed struggled over. It was originally too detailed and too specific and, hence, was subject to major transformations at the national, community, school, and then classroom levels. However, even though the national curriculum was subject to conflict, mediation, and some transformation of its content, organization, and invasive and immensely time consuming forms of evaluation, its utter power is demonstrated in its radical reconfiguration of the very process of knowledge selection, organization, and assessment. It changed the entire terrain of education radically. Its subject divisions “provide more constraint than scope for discretion.” The “standard attainment targets” that have been mandated cement these constraints in place. “The imposition of national testing locks the national curriculum in place as the dominant framework of teachers’ work whatever opportunities teachers may take to evade or reshape it.”80 Thus, it is not sufficient to state that the world of education is complex and has multiple influences. The purpose of any serious analysis is to go beyond such overly broad conclusions. Rather, we need to “discriminate degrees of influence in the world,” to weigh the relative efficacy of the factors involved. Hence, although it is clear that although the national curriculum and national tests that now exist in England and Wales have come about because of a complex interplay of forces and influences, it is equally clear that “state control has the upper hand.”81 The national curricula and national tests did generate conflict about issues. They did partly lead to the creation of social spaces for moral questions to get asked. (Of course, these moral questions had been asked all along by dispossessed groups.) Thus, it was clear to many people that the creation of mandatory and reductive tests that emphasized memory and decontextualized abstraction pulled the national curriculum in a particular direction—that of encouraging a selective educational market in which elite students and elite schools with a wide range of resources would be well (if narrowly) served.82 Diverse groups of people argued that such reductive, detailed, and simplistic paper-­and-pencil tests “had the potential to do enormous damage,” a situation that was made even worse because the tests were so onerous in terms of time and record keeping. Teachers had a good deal of support when as a group they decided to boycott

Producing Inequalities   227 the administration of the test in a remarkable act of public protest. This also led to serious questioning of the arbitrary, inflexible, and overly prescriptive national curriculum. Although the curriculum is still inherently problematic and the assessment system does still contain numerous dangerous and onerous elements within it, organized activity against them did have an impact.83 Yet, unfortunately, the story does not end there. By the mid-­1990s, even with the government’s partial retreat on such regulatory forms as its program of constant and reductive testing, it had become clearer by the year that the development of testing and the specification of content had been “hijacked” by those who were ideologically committed to traditional pedagogies and to the idea of more rigorous selection.84 The residual effects are both material and ideological. They include a continuing emphasis on trying to provide the “rigor [that is] missing in the practice of most teachers, . . . judging progress solely by what is testable in tests of this kind” and the development of a “very hostile view of the accountability of teachers” that was seen as “part of a wider thrust of policy to take away professional control of public services and establish so called consumer control through a market structure.”85 The authors of an extremely thorough review of recent assessment programs instituted in England and Wales provide a summary of what has happened. Gipps and Murphy argue that it has become increasingly obvious that the national assessment program attached to the national curriculum is more and more dominated by traditional models of testing and the assumptions about teaching and learning that lie behind them. At the same time, equity issues are becoming much less visible. In the calculus of values now in place in the regulatory state, efficiency, speed, and cost control replace more substantive concerns about social and educational justice. The pressure to get tests in place rapidly has meant that “the speed of test development is so great, and the curriculum and assessment changes so regular, that [there is] little time to carry out detailed analyses and trialing to ensure that the tests are as fair as possible to all groups.”86 Echoes of these very same effects are seen throughout major cities in the United States as well. The conditions for “thin morality”—in which the competitive individual of the market dominates and social justice will somehow take care of itself—are reproduced here. The combination of the neoliberal market and the regulatory state, then, does indeed “work.” However, it works in ways in which the metaphors of free market, merit, and effort hide the differential reality that is produced, a fact that I shall take up again in my discussion of reforms such as No Child Left Behind in the next chapter. Whereas, on the one hand, this makes a socially and culturally critical pedagogy even more essential, on the other hand it also makes it much more difficult to actually accomplish. Basil Bernstein’s discussion of the general principles by which knowledge and policies (“texts”) move from one arena to another is useful in understanding this. As Bernstein reminds us, when talking about educational change, we must be concerned with three fields. Each field has its own rules of access, regulation, privilege, and special interests: (1) the field of “production” where new knowledge is constructed; (2) the field of “reproduction” where pedagogy and curriculum are actually enacted in schools; and, between these other two; (3) the “recontextualizing” field where discourses from the field of production are appropriated and then transformed into pedagogic ­discourse and recommendations.87 This appropriation and recontextualization of

228   Producing Inequalities knowledge for educational purposes is itself governed by two sets of principles. The first—delocation—implies that there is always a selective appropriation of knowledge and discourse from the field of production. The second—relocation—points to the fact that when knowledge and discourse from the field of production is pulled within the recontextualizing field, it is subject to ideological transformations because of the various specialized and/or political interests whose conflicts structure the recontextualizing field.88 A good example of this, one that confirms Gipps and Murphy’s analysis of the dynamics of national curricula and national testing during their more recent iterations, is found in the process by which the content and organization of the mandated national curriculum in physical education were struggled over and ultimately formed in England. In this instance, a working group of academics both within and outside the field of physical education, headmasters of private and state-­supported schools, well-­ known athletes, and business leaders (but no teachers) was formed. The original curriculum policies that arose from the group were relatively mixed educationally and ideologically, taking account of the field of production of knowledge within physical education. That is, they contained both critical and progressive elements and elements of the conservative restoration, as well as academic perspectives within the specialized fields from the university. However, as these policies made their way from report to recommendations and then from recommendations to action, they steadily came closer to restorational principles. An emphasis on efficiency, basic skills and performance testing, on the social control of the body, and on competitive norms ultimately won out. Like the middle-­class capturing of the market discussed earlier, this too was not a conspiracy. Rather, it was the result of a process of “over-­determination.” That is, it was not due to an imposition of these norms, but to a combination of interests in the recontextualizing field—an economic context in which public spending was under severe scrutiny and cost savings had to be sought everywhere; government officials who were opposed to “frills” and consistently intervened to institute only a selection of the recommendations (conservative ones that did not come from “professional academics” preferably); ideological attacks on critical, progressive, or child-­centered approaches to physical education; and a predominant discourse of “being pragmatic.” These came together in the recontextualizing field and helped ensure in practice that conservative principles would be reinscribed in policies and mandates, and that critical forms were seen as too ideological, too costly, or too impractical.89 “Standards” were upheld; critical voices were heard, but ultimately to little effect; the norms of competitive performance were made central and employed as regulatory devices. Regulatory devices served to privilege specific groups in much the same way as did markets. If this is the case in physical education, it is not hard to predict what is happening and will happen in those curriculum areas that are socially defined as even higher status, and where the stakes seem higher as well. But it is important not to leave our discussion at such an abstract level or at the level of curriculum planning. What has happened in schools themselves in the United States and elsewhere when such “pragmatic” standards, curricula, and tests are actually instituted?

Producing Inequalities   229

Creating Educational Triage Analyses here in the United States have begun to document similar kinds of effects.90 However, unfortunately, the predominance of relatively unreflective and at times almost self-­congratulatory policies around markets, standards, testing, and reductive forms of accountability is exactly that here—predominant. Even given the exceptional work that is being done, for example, by Jeannie Oakes, Amy Stuart Wells, Pauline Lipman, Mary Lee Smith, and others on the hidden effects of some of these kinds of policies and practices, and even given the fact that there are numerous examples of extremely effective schools in our urban and rural areas that succeed through using much more democratic and critical models of curriculum, teaching, and evaluation,91 it still feels as if one has to constantly swim against the tide of conservative modernization.92 Given this state of affairs, it is now even more important that we pay attention to material that demonstrates what can happen in situations where the stress on higher standards and higher test scores hits both the realities of schools and the different populations they serve. David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell’s volume Rationing Education is just such a book.93 It goes into even more detail about the powerful, and often damaging, effects on teachers and students of our seeming fascination with ever-­rising standards, mandated curricula, and overemphasis on testing. The volume is based on in-­depth research on the equivalent of middle and secondary schools in England. It details the overt and hidden effects of policies that are currently being undertaken in the United States as well. These include such things as creating a situation where the tail of a high-­stakes test “wags the dog” of the teacher, pressuring schools to constantly show increased achievement scores on such standardized tests no matter what the level of support or the impoverished conditions in schools and local communities, to publicly display such results in a process of what might be realistically called shaming, and to threaten schools that do not show “improvement” on these tests with severe sanctions or loss of control. Of course, there are poor schools and there are ineffective practices in schools. However, the reduction of education to scores on what are often inadequate measures, often used in technically and educationally inappropriate ways for comparative purposes, has some serious consequences. What these consequences are provides the context for the story Gillborn and Youdell tell. In many ways, Rationing Education provides what might be called a microeconomy of school life. It examines the ways in which certain valued commodities are accumulated by schools in a time of intense competition for scarce resources. In this case, the commodities are higher test scores and the resources are both numbers of students and public recognition of being a “good” school. The authors’ way of describing this is what they call the “A–C economy.” In England, as in the United States, schools exist in what is really a hierarchical ordering, a market, in prestige and reputation. They are valued by the number of students who get passing scores on particular national tests. The national tests are made public as a form of “league tables” in which schools are rank-­ordered according to their relative results. Schools with large numbers of students getting grades A–C are more highly valued than those with students whose rates of passing are less—even though

230   Producing Inequalities everyone tacitly knows that there is a very strong relationship between school results and poverty. (We need again to remember in the United States, for example, that poverty explains much more of the variance in school achievement than any school reform.) This is straightforward and not surprising. However, this situation creates an economy that has certain characteristics. Students with predicted higher test scores are even more valuable. Students with predicted lower test scores are seen as less useful to the school’s place in the market. This too is not surprising. The results of such an economy, however, are powerful. Another key group of students is focused upon and on whom considerable resources, energy, and attention are devoted—students who are on the border between passing grades and failing grades. These students—often seen as middle-­class “underachievers”—become objects of great value in the school. After all, if this key group can be pulled across the border into the Α–C column, the school’s results will be that much more positive. What could be wrong with an increased focus on students on the border? Here is one of the places where Gillborn and Youdell’s results are ominous. In such an Α–C economy, specific students are seen as movable. Other students’ abilities are seen as increasingly fixed and less worthy of attention. The class and race characteristics of these latter students are striking. Poor and working-­class students, students of African descent, and other ethnically “different” children are not valued commodities on this kind of market. Even though gender divisions were less pronounced in the schools that Gillborn and Youdell studied, divisions strongly rooted in racializing and class-­based structures were not simply mirrored in the schools. They actually were produced in these institutions. Thus, policies that were put in place to raise standards, to increase test scores, to guarantee public accountability, and to make schools more competitive had results that were more than a little damaging to those students who were already the least advantaged in these same schools. Yet it was not only the students who witnessed these negative effects. The voices of teachers and administrators indicate what happens to them as well. They too begin to harden their sense of which students are “able” and which students are not. Tracking returns in both overt and covert ways. And once again, black students and students in government-­subsidized lunch programs are the ones most likely to be placed in those tracks or given academic and career advice that nearly guarantees that they will have limited or no mobility and will confirm their status as students who are “less worthy.” Equally worth noting here is the specific way the A–C economy works to choose those students who are deemed to have worthiness. Often, students whose behavior and test results are quite similar have very different careers in the school. Thus, a black student and a white student may be, say, on the border of the A–C/failing divide, but the black student will not be the beneficiary of the added attention. These situations are all too often characterized by tacitly operating visions of ability, ones that have been hardened by years of discourse on the “problem” of black student achievement and especially by the increased visibility once again of supposedly scientific (and ultimately racist and empirically problematic) “research” on genetic differences in mean intelligence between blacks and whites. As I noted, not only would no reputable population geneticist make such a claim, but these theories have been discredited multiple times.94

Producing Inequalities   231 The fact that they reenter into our commonsense decision making in schools in times of scarce resources and increased pressure shows how deeply seated such preconceived notions are in the sets of assumptions educators may unconsciously mobilize in their attempt to be pragmatic in dealing with large numbers of students. As previous research has clearly indicated, students are not passive in the face of these tendencies. Indeed, as Gillborn and Youdell show, students “interpret, question, and on occasion, resist.” However, “the scope for resistance is severely constrained, and pupils are clearly positioned as the subject of numerous organizational and disciplinary discourses in which the young people themselves play little active role.”95 In what is perhaps one of the most powerful messages of the book, the authors summarize the effects of this entire process in the following way. “It is a cruel irony that the processes of selection and monitoring that have been adopted with the aim of heightening attainment are so frequently experienced as disempowering and demotivating by the students.”96 These experiences are turned into feelings of being treated unfairly, of teachers and schools being organized in ways that privilege the already privileged in terms of class and race. If this is the case, some of the most powerful messages “reforms” of this type may send is that not only is the world deeply unfair but also that schools themselves are prime examples of institutions that simply respond to those who already possess economic and cultural capital. This is decidedly not the message that any society that is serious about what might be called thick democracy wants to teach. But it may be what our children, including many like Joseph, learn in school systems that are so driven by the assumption that putting into place higher standards and higher-­stakes testing will somehow magically solve deep-­seated educational and social problems. A close reading of Rationing Education should make us much more cautious about such unwarranted assumptions. Unfortunately, recent research on the effects of all the preceding issues in the United States confirms these worries. Although I will go into more detail about this in the next chapter, some of this is still important to note here. For example, Linda McNeil’s powerful and detailed investigation of what has actually happened in Texas when state-­mandated “reforms” involving imposed standards and curricula, reductive and competitive testing, and attacks on teachers’ professionalism were instituted demonstrates in no uncertain terms that the very children and schools that these policies and practices are supposed to help are actually hurt in the process.97 The same is true in Pauline Lipman’s insightful research on Chicago public schools.98 Similar tendencies toward producing inequalities have been documented in the conservative modernization reforms in tax credits, testing, and curricula in Arizona and elsewhere.99 Thus goeth democracy in education.

Thinking Strategically In this chapter, I have raised serious questions about current educational “reform” efforts now under way in a number of nations. I have used research from England, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere to document some of the hidden differential effects of two connected strategies—neoliberal-­inspired market proposals and neoliberal-, neoconservative-, and middle-­class-managerial-­inspired regulatory proposals. Taking a key from Herbert Kliebard’s historical analysis, I have described how

232   Producing Inequalities different interests with different educational and social visions compete for dominion in the social field of power surrounding educational policy and practice. In the process, I have documented some of the complexities and imbalances in this field of power. These complexities and imbalances result in thin rather than thick morality and in the reproduction of both dominant pedagogical and curricular forms and ideologies and the social privileges that accompany them. I have suggested that the rhetorical flourishes of the discourses of critical pedagogy need to come to grips with these changing material and ideological conditions. Critical pedagogy cannot and will not occur in a vacuum. Unless we honestly face these profound rightist transformations and think tactically about them, we will have little effect either on the creation of a counterhegemonic commonsense or on the building of a counterhegemonic alliance. The growth of that odd combination of marketization and regulatory state, the move toward pedagogic similarity and “traditional” academic curricula and teaching, the ability of dominant groups to exert leadership in the struggle over this, and the accompanying shifts in commonsense—all this cannot be wished away. Instead, it needs to be confronted honestly and self-­critically. Having said this, however, I want to point to a hidden paradox in what I have done. Even though much of my own and others’ research recently has been on the processes and effects of conservative modernization, we should be aware of the dangers in such a focus. Research on the history, politics, and practices of rightist social and educational movements and “reforms” has enabled us to show the contradictions and unequal effects of such policies and practices. It has enabled the rearticulation of claims to social justice on the basis of solid evidence. This is all to the good. However, in the process, one of the latent effects has been the gradual framing of educational issues largely in terms of the conservative agenda. The very categories themselves—markets, choice, national curricula, national testing, standards—bring the debate onto the terrain established by neoliberals and neoconservatives. The analysis of “what is” has led to a neglect of “what might be.” Thus, there has been a withering of substantive large-­scale discussions of feasible alternatives to neoliberal and neoconservative visions, policies, and practices, ones that would move well beyond them.100 Because of this, at least part of our task may be politically and conceptually complex, but it can be said simply. In the long term, we need to “develop a political project that is both local yet generalizable, systematic without making Eurocentric, masculinist claims to essential and universal truths about human subjects.”101 Another part of our task, though, must be and is more proximate, more appropriately educational. While I say more about this throughout the book and especially in my final chapter, defensible, articulate, and fully fleshed out alternative critical and progressive policies and practices in curriculum, teaching, and evaluation need to be developed and made widely available. But this too must be done with due recognition of the changing nature of the social field of power and the importance of thinking tactically and strategically. Let me be specific here. For example, in the United States, the increasingly popular journal Rethinking Schools has provided an important forum for social and educational criticism and for descriptions of critical educational practices in schools and communities. At times influenced directly by the work of Paulo Freire and by educators who have themselves elaborated and extended it, and at other times coming out of diverse indigenous radical

Producing Inequalities   233 educational traditions specific to the United States, Rethinking Schools and emerging national organizations such as the National Coalition of Educational Activists have jointly constructed spaces for critical educators, cultural and political activists, radical scholars, and others to teach each other, to provide supportive criticism of one another’s work, and to build a more collective set of responses to the destructive educational and social policies coming from the conservative restoration.102 In using the phrase “collective responses,” however, I need to stress that this phrase does not signify anything like “democratic centrism” in which a small group or a party cadre speaks for the majority and establishes the “appropriate” position. Given that there are diverse emancipatory movements whose voices are heard in publications like Rethinking Schools and in organizations such as the National Coalition of Educational Activists—antiracist and postcolonial positions, radical forms of multiculturalism, gays and lesbians, multiple feminist voices, neo-­Marxists and democratic socialists, “greens,” and so on—a more appropriate way of looking at what is happening is to call it a decentered unity. Multiple progressive projects, multiple “critical pedagogies,” are articulated. Like Freire, each of them is related to real struggles in real institutions in real communities. We of course should not be romantic about this. There are very real differences—political, epistemological, and/or educational—in these varied voices. But they are united in their opposition to the forces involved in the new conservative hegemonic alliance. There are tensions, but the decentered unity has remained strong enough for each constituent group to support the struggles of the others. This is not all. At the same time as these critical movements are being built, critical educators are also attempting to occupy the spaces provided by existing “mainstream” publication outlets to publish books that provide critical answers to teachers’ questions about “What do I do on Monday?” during a conservative era. This space has too long been ignored by many theorists of critical pedagogy. Some of these attempts have been remarkably successful. Let me give one example. One very large “professional” organization in the United States—the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD)—publishes books that are distributed each year to its more than 150,000 members, most of whom are teachers or administrators in elementary, middle, or secondary schools. ASCD has not been a very progressive organization, preferring to publish largely technicist and overtly depoliticized material. Yet it has been concerned that its publications have not sufficiently represented socially and culturally critical educators. It, thus, has been looking for ways to increase its legitimacy to a wider range of educators. Because of this legitimacy problem and because of its large membership, it became clear to a number of people who were part of the critical educational traditions in the United States that it might be possible to convince ASCD to publish and widely circulate material that would demonstrate the actual practical successes of critical models of curriculum, teaching, and evaluation in solving real problems in schools and communities, especially with working-­class and poor children and children of color. After intense negotiations that guaranteed an absence of censorship, a colleague of mine and I agreed to publish a book—Democratic Schools103—with ASCD that provided clear practical examples of the power of Freirean and similar critical approaches at work in classrooms and communities. Democratic Schools was not only distributed to all 150,000 members of the organization, but it has gone on to sell an additional

234   Producing Inequalities 100,000 copies. Thus, nearly 250,000 copies of a volume that tells the practical stories of the largely successful struggles of critically oriented educators in real schools are now in the hands of educators who daily face similar problems.104 This is an important intervention. Although there is no guarantee that teachers will always be progressive (nor is there any guarantee that those who are progressive around class and union issues will be equally progressive around issues of gender, sexuality, and race), many teachers do have socially and pedagogically critical intuitions. However, they often do not have ways of putting these intuitions into practice because they cannot picture them in action in daily situations. Because of this, critical theoretical and political insights, then, have nowhere to go in terms of their embodiment in concrete pedagogical situations where the politics of curriculum and teaching must be enacted. This is a tragic absence and strategically filling it is absolutely essential. Thus, we need to use and expand the spaces in which critical pedagogical “stories” are made available so that these positions do not remain only on the theoretical or rhetorical level. The publication and widespread distribution of Democratic Schools provides one instance of using and expanding such spaces in ways that make Freirean and similar critical educational positions seem actually doable in “ordinary” institutions such as schools and local communities. Although crucial, it is then not enough to deconstruct restorational policies in education. The right has shown how important changes in common sense are in the struggle for education. It is our task to collectively help rebuild it by reestablishing a sense that thick morality, and a thick democracy, are truly possible today. This cannot be done without paying considerably more attention to two things. The first—the material and ideological transformations that the right has effected—has been a key topic of this chapter. Yet another element needs to be stressed—the building of large-­scale counterhegemonic movements that connect educational struggles to those in other sites and also assist both in creating new struggles and defending existing ones within educational institutions themselves. In the current conservative context, some of the material on critical pedagogy has characteristics that make this an even more difficult act, however. In the past, I have warned that the stylistic politics of some of our most “advanced” work forces the reader to do all of the work.105 Neologism after neologism reigns supreme. As Dennis Carlson and I have argued elsewhere,106 the discourse of critical pedagogy in its Freirean and feminist forms has increasingly been influenced by postmodern theories. While this has proven to be very useful in reconceptualizing the field and its politics, it has also opened up the discourse to the criticism that it has become too theoretical, abstract, esoteric, and out of touch with the conflicts and struggles that teachers, students, and activists act on. Henry Giroux and others have defended these discourses as necessary in critical pedagogy, as to reconstruct the world one must first learn to speak a new language and “new ideas require new terms.”107 This is undoubtedly correct. Indeed, such a position is one I consciously took when I first introduced Gramscian and Habermasian theories into education in the early 1970s. Yet, having said this, given the very real success of the strategy of “plain speaking” by neoliberals and neoconservatives, some of the criticisms of material on critical pedagogy do have power. Even though a good deal of it is rich and provocative, some of it is conceptually and politically confused and confusing. Some of it is disconnected from

Producing Inequalities   235 the gritty materialities of daily economic, political, and educational/cultural struggles. Some of it does romanticize the cultural at the expense of equally powerful traditions of analysis based in political economy and the state. And some of it does place so much emphasis on the “post” that it forgets the structural realities that set limits on real people in real institutions in everyday life. Thus, as many commentators have argued repeatedly, much more effort must be given to ground the discourse of critical pedagogy in the concrete struggles of multiple and identifiable groups.108 Much of it needs to be considerably less dismissive of previous critical traditions that—rightly—continue to influence educational and cultural activists. Just as important, as I just noted, what critical pedagogies actually look like when put into practice—not only their theoretical elaborations—needs to made much more visible than we have been apt to do. Unfortunately, when rightist mobilizations have had no small measure of success in creating a reactionary common sense about education (and even among many educators), the linguistic styles of all too much critical work gets labeled as “arrogant” (sometimes appropriately) and cuts itself off from many of the radical teachers and activists it wants to support. It is hard work not to be sloppy. It is hard work to write in such a way that theoretical and political nuance are not sacrificed on the altar of common sense, but also in a way that the hard work of reading can actually pay off for the reader her- or himself. And it is hard and time-­consuming work to write at multiple levels. But if we don’t, neoliberals and neoconservatives will. And we will be much the worse for it. In this time of conservative restoration, the multiple projects of critical education are indeed crucial. A good dose of reality will do no harm, and I believe will actually make them more effective in the long run. Although populism can and has been a double-­edged sword, being effective, then, requires a somewhat more populist set of impulses than those that have dominated critical pedagogy over the past years. However, the terrain out of which such populist forms grow is already being occupied by a very different kind of “popular” consciousness. Nearly all populisms are critical of elitist tendencies. Yet who and what actually counts as elitism is part of a contested terrain. Unfortunately, in part because the left has evacuated that terrain, the kinds of populism that are currently growing most rapidly are authoritarian in nature. Although they do cohere around themes that are based on “plain speaking” and “letting the people decide,” they are all too often based on assumptions that God has selected “the people” whose voices are more important than anyone else’s. As I noted in Chapters 1 and 2, authoritarian populism is an increasingly powerful and persuasive social movement in many nations throughout the world. Its adherents have been integrated under the umbrella of conservative modernization also in part because neoliberals and neoconservatives have been able to tap into the strong undercurrents of populist resentment that exist among many segments of the (especially) white population. The right has understood Gramscian strategies—and has used them for retrogressive purposes. We shall turn to the structures of the authoritarian populist world shortly. No progressive counterhegemonic strategy, no critical pedagogy, can succeed unless it understands the reality constructed by these groups. I devote Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 to their history; to their economic, political, and cultural arguments; and to their claims about educational policy and practice.

236   Producing Inequalities But before we examine these issues, we still need to spend a bit more time on what is happening in dominant reforms in the United States and elsewhere, so that the growing power of the new middle class and the complicated politics of race involved in neoliberal and neoconservative policies are made more visible. This is the task of Chapter 4 and its critical examination of the assumptions and effects of the logics underpinning No Child Left Behind and similar educational “reforms.”

Notes    1. Geoff Whitty, “Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change,” in Educability, Schools, and Ideology, ed. Michael Flude and John Ahier (London: Halstead Press, 1974), 112–137.    2. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).    3. Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995).    4. John Rury and Jeffrey Mirel, “The Political Economy of Urban Education,” in Review of Research in Education, Volume 22, ed. Michael W. Apple (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1997), 49–110; Kenneth Teitelbaum, Schooling for Good Rebels (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996); and Steven Seiden, Inheriting Shame (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999).    5. Michael W. Apple, Official Knowledge, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000) and Michael W. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).    6. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994). See also Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg, and Aaron D. Gresson, eds., Measured Lies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).    7. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education, 22–41.    8. Stuart Ranson, “Theorizing Educational Policy,” Journal of Education Policy 10 (July 1995): 427.    9. David Gillborn, “Race, Nation, and Education,” unpublished paper, Institute of Education, University of London, 1997, 2.   10. Gary McCulloch, “Privatising the Past,” British Journal of Educational Studies 45 (March 1997): 80.   11. See E. D. Hirsch Jr., The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996).   12. Quoted in McCulloch, “Privatising the Past,” 78.   13. Ibid.   14. Ibid.   15. John Chubb and Terry Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990) and Geoff Whitty, “Creating Quasi-­Markets in Education,” in Review of Research in Education, Volume 22, ed. Michael W. Apple (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1997), 3–47.   16. David Gillborn, “Racism and Reform,” British Educational Research Journal 23 (June 1997): 357.   17. Michael W. Apple, Power, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) and Michael W. Apple, Teachers and Texts (New York: Routledge, 1988). Of course, there has been a considerable amount of literature on the question of “clarity” in critical educational writings, with contributions on both sides made by Burbules, Giroux, Lather, Gitlin, myself, and a number of others. My own position on this is that such a debate is essential and that while there is a danger in sacrificing theoretical elegance and the richness and subtlety of language in our attempts to be clear, there is still a good deal of arrogance and truly sloppy and merely rhetorical writing within the multiple communities of critical educational work. Obviously, there is a need to respond to complexity, but there is also a need not to marginalize sympathetic readers.

Producing Inequalities   237   18. Gillborn, “Racism and Reform,” 353.   19. Ibid.   20. Herrnstein and Murray, The Bell Curve and Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.   21. Roger Dale quoted in Ian Menter, Yolande Muschamp, Peter Nicholls, Jenny Ozga, with Andrew Pollard, Work and Identity in the Primary School (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1997), 27.   22. Menter et al., Work and Identity in the Primary School, 27.   23. See Whitty, “Creating Quasi-­Markets in Education.” See also Geoff Whitty, Tony Edwards, and Sharon Gewirtz, Specialization and Choice in Urban Education (London: Routledge, 1993) and Apple, Cultural Politics and Education. The integration of markets, standards, and performance indicators is clearly expressed in David Stearns and James Harvey, A Legacy of Learning: Your Stake in Standards and New Kinds of Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2000). This book is an intriguing example of “plain talk” and manages to strike a series of populist notes while at the same time placing the needs of the economy and efficiency at the very center of its proposals for “democracy.”   24. Chubb and Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools.   25. Sally Power, David Halpin, and John Fitz, “Underpinning Choice and Diversity,” in Educational Reform and Its Consequences, ed. Sally Tomlinson (London: IPPR/Rivers Oram Press, 1994), 27.   26. Whether there have been significant changes in this regard given the victory by “New Labour” over the Conservatives in the last election is open to question. Certain aspects of neoliberal and neoconservative policies have already been accepted by Labour, such as stringent cost controls on spending put in place by the previous Conservative government and an aggressive focus on “raising standards” in association with strict performance indicators. See, for example, David Gillborn and Deborah Youdell, Rationing Education (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000).   27. See Power, Halpin, and Fitz, “Underpinning Choice and Diversity” and Gillborn and Youdell, Rationing Education.   28. Stephen Ball, Richard Bowe, and Sharon Gewirtz, “Market Forces and Parental Choice,” in Educational Reform and Its Consequences, ed. Sally Tomlinson (London: IPPR/Rivers Oram Press, 1994), 39.   29. Ibid., 17–19.   30. Mark Olssen, “In Defense of the Welfare State and of Publicly Provided Education,” Journal of Education Policy 11 (May 1996), 340.   31. See Sally Power, Tony Edwards, Geoff Whitty, and Valerie Wigfall, Education and the Middle Class (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003) and Stephen Ball, Class Strategies and the Education Market (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).   32. Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz, “Market Forces and Parental Choice,” 19.   33. See the discussion of the racial state in Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994) and the analyses of race and representation in Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds., Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Cameron McCarthy, The Uses of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998).   34. Bourdieu, Distinction.   35. Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz, “Market Forces and Parental Choice,” 20–22.   36. Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, The Unknown City (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).   37. Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996) and David Swartz, Culture and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).   38. Apple, Teachers and Texts and Apple, Official Knowledge, 113–136.   39. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 12–13.   40. Ibid., 36.   41. Olssen, “In Defense of the Welfare State and Publicly Provided Education.”   42. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 37–38. See also the

238   Producing Inequalities ­ iscussion of managerialism and the state in John Clarke and Janet Newman, The Managed rial State (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997).   43. This is discussed in greater detail in Michael W. Apple, Education and Power, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995).   44. See Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson, Schooling Sexualities (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998); and Sue Middleton, Disciplining Sexualities (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).   45. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 60–62.   46. Among the best work here is Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptis (New York: Routledge, 1997).   47. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 63.   48. Ibid., 67–68. See also Gillborn and Youdell, Rationing Education.   49. Youdell and Gillborn’s Rationing Education demonstrates this clearly. What is also important here is that this has consistently happened even in the face of overt attempts to use such policies to alter existing inequalities. See also Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 119–120.   50. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 80.   51. Ibid. See also Gillborn and Youdell, Rationing Education and Sharon Gewirtz, Stephen Ball, and Richard Bowe, Markets, Choice, and Equity in Education (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1995). We need to be very cautious of employing these data to legitimate the “model minority” stereotype of Asian students. See Stacey Lee, Unraveling the Model-­ Minority Stereotype (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996).   52. Hugh Lauder and David Hughes, Trading in Futures (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 2.   53. Ibid., 29. See also Phil Brown, “Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion,” in Education: Culture, Economy, and Society, ed. A. H. Halsey, Hugh Lauder, Phil Brown, and Amy Stuart Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 736–749.   54. Lauder and Hughes, Trading in Futures, 101.   55. Ibid., 132.   56. See Michael W. Apple et al., The State and the Politics of Knowledge (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 109–147.   57. On the issue of a racial contract that underpins nearly all social arrangements in our kind of society, see Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). I am drawing as well on Benedict Anderson’s position that nations are themselves based on “imagined communities.” See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991).   58. See, for example, the analysis of the gender dynamics surrounding neoliberal policies in Madeleine Arnot, Miriam David, and Gaby Weiner, Closing the Gender Gap (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). The ways in which neoconservative policies act on and through the politics of sexuality and the body as well are nicely described in Epstein and Johnson, Schooling Sexualities.   59. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 98. See also Amy Stuart Wells, Beyond the Rhetoric of Charter School Reform (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, 1999).   60. Whitty, Power, and Halpin, Devolution and Choice in Education, 112–113.   61. Ibid., 14.   62. Ibid., 42.   63. Jeffrey R. Henig, Rethinking School Choice: Limits of a Market Metaphor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 222. See also some of the comments in Michael Engel, The Struggle to Control Public Education (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).   64. See Jean Anyon, Radical Possibilities (New York: Routledge, 2005).   65. See especially the discussion of the role of the state in this in Bourdieu, The State Nobility.   66. Loic Wacquant, “Foreword” to Bourdieu, The State Nobility, xiii.   67. Bourdieu, The State Nobility, 273.   68. Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz, “Market Forces and Parental Choice,” 24.

Producing Inequalities   239   69. Menter et al., Work and Identity, 8.   70. Ibid., 57. The work of Susan Robertson on the global effects of these transformations, especially on teachers, is exceptional. See, for example, Susan Robertson, A Class Act: Changing Teachers’ Work, the State, and Globalization (New York: Falmer Press, 2000).   71. Ibid., 9.   72. Ibid., 24.   73. Ibid.   74. Apple, Cultural Politics and Education, 22–41.   75. Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz, “Market Forces and Parental Choice,” 23.   76. Power, Halpin, and Fitz, “Underpinning Choice and Diversity,” 38.   77. Ranson, “Theorizing Educational Policy,” 436.   78. Ibid. See also Misook Kim Cho and Michael W. Apple, “Schooling, Work, and Subjectivity,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 19 (Summer 1998): 269–290.   79. Ranson, “Theorizing Educational Policy,” 437.   80. Richard Hatcher and Barry Troyna quoted in ibid., 438.   81. Ranson, “Theorizing Educational Policy,” 438.   82. Philip O’Hear, “An Alternative National Curriculum,” in Educational Reform and Its Consequences, ed. Sally Tomlinson (London: IPPR/Rivers Oram Press, 1994), 66.   83. Ibid., 55–57.   84. Ibid., 68.   85. Ibid., 65–66.   86. Caroline Gipps and Patricia Murphy, A Fair Test? (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994), 204.   87. See Basil Bernstein, The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1990); Basil Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity (Bristol, Pa.: Taylor & Francis, 1996); and Apple, Official Knowledge, 61–88.   88. John Evans and Dawn Penney, “The Politics of Pedagogy,” Journal of Education Policy 10 (January 1995): 27–44. See also Apple et al., The State and the Politics of Knowledge, 81–107.   89. Evans and Penney, “The Politics of Pedagogy,” 41–42.   90. See, for example, Robert Linn, “Assessment and Accountability,” Educational Researcher 29 (March 2000): 4–16; Jeannie Oakes, “Can Tracking Research Inform Practice?” Educational Researcher 21 (March 1992): 12–21; Jeannie Oakes, Amy Stuart Wells, Makeba Jones, and Amanda Datnow, “Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform,” Teachers College Record 98 (Spring 1997): 482–510; and Amy Stuart Wells, Alejandra Lopez, Janelle Scott, and Jennifer Holme, “Charter Schools as Postmodern Paradox: Rethinking Social Stratification in an Age of Deregulated School Choice,” Harvard Educational Review 69 (Summer 1999): 172–204.   91. See, for example, Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane, eds., Democratic Schools (Alex­ andria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995).   92. For more discussion of this, see Pauline Lipman, High Stakes Education (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) and Mary Lee Smith, with Linda Miller-­Kahn, Walter Heinecke, and Patricia Jarvis, Political Spectacle and the Fate of American Schools (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).   93. Gillborn and Youdell, Rationing Education.   94. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981) and Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999).   95. Gillborn and Youdell, Rationing Education, 194.   96. Ibid., 195.   97. Linda McNeil, Contradictions of School Reform (New York: Routledge, 2000).   98. Lipman, High Stakes Education.   99. See Glen Y. Wilson, “Effects on Funding Equity of the Arizona Tax Credit Law,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 2000 and Michele S. Moses, “The Arizona Tax Credit and Hidden Considerations of Justice,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April 2000. See also Mary Lee Smith, Walter Heinecke,

240   Producing Inequalities and Audrey Noble, “Assessment Policy and Political Spectacle,” Teachers College Record 101 (Winter 1999): 157–191. 100. Terri Seddon, “Markets and the English,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 18 (June 1997): 165–166. 101. Alan Luke, “Series Editor’s Introduction” to Jay Lemke, Textual Politics (Bristol, Pa.: Taylor & Francis, 1995), vi–vii. 102. Rethinking Schools is one of the best examples of the ways critical academics, elementary/ middle/high school teachers, students, and community activists can work together in nonelitist ways. Information can be obtained from Rethinking Schools, 1001 E. Keefe Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisc. 53212, USA. For faxes, the number is 414–964–7220. The Web site is www.rethinkingschools.org. For an articulate discussion of Freire’s work and of the complexities of putting it into practice in schools, see Maria Pilar O’Cadiz, Pia Lindquist Wong, and Carlos Alberto Torres, Education and Democracy: Paulo Freire, Social Movements, and Educational Reform in Sao Paulo (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998). Freire’s work, however, has too often been appropriated in rhetorical and/or depoliticized ways in the United States. See my discussion of this in Michael W. Apple, Power, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). 103. Apple and Beane, eds., Democratic Schools. 104. Translations of this volume have been or are due to be published in Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere. A Commonwealth edition for the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and other nations has also recently appeared. See Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane, eds., Democratic Schools: Lessons from the Chalk Face (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1999). Thus, it is clear that providing critical answers to the pressing issues of “What do I do on Monday?” is seen as crucial in a number of nations. 105. Apple, Teachers and Texts and Apple, Power, Meaning, and Identity. 106. Dennis Carlson and Michael W. Apple, “Critical Educational Theory in Unsettling Times,” in Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy, ed. Dennis Carlson and Michael W. Apple (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 1–38. 107. Henry Giroux, Border Crossings (Routledge, 1992), 219. 108. One of the clearest discussions of the ethical and political dilemmas of doing critical theoretical and empirical work with due recognition of the importance of connecting this work to the lived culture of social actors in their everyday lives can be found in Fine and Weis, The Unknown City, 264–288. See also Carlson and Apple, Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (New York: ZedBooks, 1999).

13 “We Are the New Oppressed” Gender, Culture, and the Work of Home Schooling

Introduction1 In Educating the “Right” Way (Apple, 2001; see also Apple et al., 2003), I spend a good deal of time detailing the world as seen through the eyes of authoritarian populists. These are conservative groups of religious fundamentalists and evangelicals whose voices in the debates over social and educational policies are now increasingly powerful. I critically analyzed the ways in which they construct themselves as the new oppressed, as people whose identities and cultures are ignored by or attacked in schools and the media. They have taken on subaltern identities and have (very selectively) reappropriated the discourses and practices of figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King to lay claim to the fact that they are the last truly dispossessed groups. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the claim to subaltern status has led to a partial withdrawal from state-­run institutions, and to a practice of schooling that is meant to equip the children of authoritarian populist parents both with an armor to defend what these groups believe is their threatened culture and with a set of skills and values that will change the world so that it reflects the conservative religious commitments that are so central to their lives. I shall focus on the ways in which new technologies, such as the Internet, have become essential resources in what authoritarian populists see as a counter-­hegemonic struggle against secular humanism and a world that no longer “listens to God’s word” (Apple, 2001). Much of my discussion will center around the place of gender in these movements, because conservative women have multiple identities within them, as they are simultaneously able to claim subaltern status based on the history of dominant gender regimes and have dominant status given their positioning in relationship to other oppressed groups.

Technology and Social Movement Resources There has been an explosion of analyses of the Internet in education, cultural studies, sociology, the social studies of technology and science, and elsewhere. Much of this material has been of considerable interest and has led to a good deal of discussion of the use, benefits, history, and status of such technologies (see, e.g., Bromley & Apple, 1998; Cuban, 2001; Godwin, 2003; Hakken, 1999; Jordan, 1999). However, much of this debate is carried on with limited reference to the contexts in which the Internet is actually used, or the context is mentioned as an issue but remains relatively unexamined. As

242   “We Are the New Oppressed” one of the more perceptive writers on the social uses and benefits of the Internet has said, “We can only understand the impact of the Internet on modern culture if we see that symbolic content and online interaction are embedded in social and historical contexts of various kinds” (Slevin, 2000, p. ix). As Manuel Castells reminds us, rather than having a unitary meaning and use, the new communications networks that are being created “are made of many cultures, many values, many projects, that cross through the minds and inform the strategies of the various participants” (1996, p. 199). New technologies have both been stimulated by and have themselves stimulated three overlapping dynamics: (1) the intensification of globalization, (2) the detraditionalizing of society, and (3) the intensification of social reflexivity (Slevin, 2000, p. 5). In the process, technologies such as the Web and the Internet have provided the basis for new forms of solidarity as groups of people seek to deal with the transformations brought about by these dynamics. Yet the search for such forms of solidarity that would restore or defend tradition and authority can itself lead to the production of new forms of social disintegration at one and the same time (pp. 5–6). In this chapter, I examine a growing instance of this paradoxical process of solidarity and disintegration. By focusing on the social uses of the Internet by a new but increasingly powerful group of educational activists—conservative Christian evangelical home schoolers—I want to contribute both to our understanding of how populist conservative movements grow and support themselves ideologically, and to the complex ways in which technological resources can serve a multitude of social agendas. I argue that only by placing these technologies back into the social and ideological context of their use by specific communities (and by specific people within these communities) can we understand the meaning and function of new technologies in society and in education. In order to accomplish this, I also focus on the labor of home schooling, on how it is organized, on new definitions of legitimate knowledge, and on how all this has been partly transformed by the ways in which technological markets are being created.

Technology and the Growth of Home Schooling The connections between conservative evangelical forms and technologies are not new by any means. Elsewhere, others and I have written about the creative use of electronic ministries both nationally and internationally by the authoritarian populist religious right (see, e.g., Apple, 2001). Technological resources such as television and radio have been employed to expand the influence of conservative religious impulses, and to make “the word of God” available to believers, and “those who are yet to believe” alike.2 While understanding that the increasing range and impact of such efforts is crucial, here I am less interested in such things. I want to point to more mundane but growing uses of technologies such as the Internet in supporting evangelical efforts that are closer to home. And I do mean home literally. Home schooling is growing rapidly. But it is not simply the result of additive forces. It is not simply an atomistic phenomenon in which, one by one, isolated parents decide to reject organized public schools and teach their children at home. Home schooling is a social movement. It is a collective project, one with a history and a set of organizational and material supports (Stevens, 2001, p. 4).

“We Are the New Oppressed”   243 While many educators devote a good deal of their attention to reforms such as charter schools, and such schools have received a good deal of positive press, there are many fewer children in charter schools than there are being home schooled. In 1996, home school advocates estimated that there were approximately 1.3 million children being home schooled in the United States. More recent estimates put the figure even higher. Given the almost reverential and rather romantic coverage in national and local media of home schooling (with the New York Times and Time magazine providing a large amount of very positive coverage, for example), the numbers may in fact be much higher than this, and the growth curve is undoubtedly increasing. The home schooling movement is not homogeneous. It includes people of a wide spectrum of political/ideological, religious, and educational beliefs. It cuts across racial and class lines. As Stevens notes, there are in essence two general groupings within the home school movement, Christian and inclusive. There are some things that are shared across these fault lines, however: (1) a sense that the standardized education offered by mainstream schooling interferes with their children’s potential, (2) that there is a serious danger when the state intrudes into the life of the family, and (3) that experts and bureaucracies are apt to impose their beliefs and are unable to meet the needs of families and children (Stevens, 2001, pp.  4–7). These worries tap currents that are widespread within American culture and they too cut across particular social and cultural divides. Yet it would be wrong to interpret the mistrust of experts by many home schoolers as simply a continuation of the current of anti-­intellectualism that seems to run deep in parts of the history of the United States. The mistrust of science, government experts, and rationality became much more general as a result of the Vietnam War, when the attacks on scientists for their inhumanity, on government for lying, and on particular forms of instrumental rationality for their loss of values and ethics spread into the common sense of society. This was often coupled with a mistrust of authority in general (Moore, 1999, p. 109). Home schoolers are not only not immune to such tendencies, but combine them in creative ways with other elements of popular consciousness concerning the importance of education in times of rapid change and economic, cultural, and moral threat. Demographic information on home schoolers is limited, but in general home schoolers seem to be somewhat better educated, slightly more affluent, and consider­ ably more likely to be white than the population in the state in which they reside (Stevens, 2001, p.  11). While it is important to recognize the diversity of the movement, it is just as crucial to understand that the largest group of people who home school have conservative religious commitments and are what I have called elsewhere “authoritarian populists” (Apple, 2001). Given the dominance of conservative Christians in the home schooling movement, this picture matches the overall demographic patterns of evangelical Christians in general (Smith, 1998). Based on a belief that schooling itself is a very troubled institution (but often with widely divergent interpretations of what has caused these troubles), home schoolers have created mechanisms where “horror stories” about schools are shared, as are stories of successful home schooling practices. The metaphors that describe what goes on in public schools and the dangers associated with them, especially those used by many conservative evangelical home schoolers, are telling. Stevens puts it in the ­following way:

244   “We Are the New Oppressed” Invoking the rhetoric of illness (“cancer,” “contagion”) to describe the dangers of uncontrolled peer interaction, believers frame the child-­world of school as a kind of jungle where parents send their kids only at risk of infection. The solution: keep them at home, away from that environment altogether. (2001, p. 53) Given these perceived dangers, through groups that have been formed at both regional and national levels, home schooling advocates press departments of education and legislatures to guarantee their rights to home school their children. They have established communicative networks—newsletters, magazines, and increasingly the Internet—to build and maintain a community of fellow believers, a community that is often supported by ministries that reinforce the “wisdom” (and very often godliness) of their choice. And as we shall see, the business community has increasingly begun to realize that this can be a lucrative market (Stevens, 2001, p. 4). Religious publishers, for profit publishing houses large and small, conservative colleges and universities, Internet entrepreneurs, and others have understood that a market in cultural goods—classroom materials, lesson plans, textbooks, religious material, CDs, and so forth—has been created. They have rushed to respond to the expressed needs and to stimulate needs that are not yet recognized as needs themselves. But the market would not be there unless what created the opportunity for such a market—the successful identity work of the evangelical movement itself—had not provided the space in which such a market could operate.

Understanding Social Movements Conservative Christian home schoolers are part of a larger evangelical movement that has been increasingly influential in education, politics, and in cultural institutions such as the media (Apple, 2001; Binder, 2002). Nationally, white evangelicals constitute approximately 25% of the adult population in the United States (Green, 2000, p.  2). The evangelical population is growing steadily (Smith, 1998) as it actively provides subject positions and new identities for people who feel unmoored in a world where, for them, “all that is sacred is profaned” and where the tensions and structures of feeling of advanced capitalism do not provide either a satisfying emotional or spiritual life. The search for a “return”—in the face of major threats to what they see as accepted relations of gender/sex, of authority and tradition, of nation and family—is the guiding impulse behind the growth of this increasingly powerful social movement (Apple, 2001). Social movements often have multiple goals that may or may not be reached. Yet it is also important to understand that they can produce consequences that are much broader than their avowed goals and that are not always foreseen. Thus, social movements that aim at structural transformations in state policies may produce profound changes in the realms of culture, everyday life, and identity. The mobilizations around specific goals as well can strengthen internal solidarities, cement individual and collective identity shifts in place, create a new common sense, and ultimately lead to perceptible shifts in public attitudes about a given issue (Giugni, 1999, pp. xxi–xxiii). They also create “innovative action repertoires” and have an influence on the practices and

“We Are the New Oppressed”   245 culture of mainstream organizations (Amenta & Young, 1999, p. 34). As we shall see, this is exactly what is happening both in the lives of home schoolers, and in the ways in which organized public school systems have responded to the perceived threat to their financial well-­being by a growing home school population. A key to all this is something I mentioned above—the importance of identity politics. For social movements to prosper, they must provide identities that constantly revivify the reasons for participating in them. They must, hence, have an emotional economy in which the costs of being “different” are balanced by the intense meanings and satisfactions of acting in opposition to dominant social norms and values. This doesn’t happen all at once. People are changed by participating in oppositional movements such as home schooling. As social movement theorists have widely recognized, there are crucial biographical impacts of participating in movements. People become transformed in the process (see, e.g., McAdam, 1999). This point is clearly made by Meyer: By engaging in the social life of a challenging movement, an individual’s experience of the world is mediated by a shared vision of the way the world works and, importantly, the individual’s position in it. By engaging in activism, an individual creates himself or herself as a subject, rather than simply an object, in history and . . . is unlikely to retreat to passive acceptance of the world as it is. (1999, p. 186)

Technology and Doing Home Schooling A large portion of social movement activity targets the state (Amenta & Young, 1999, p. 30), and this is especially the case with the home schooling movement. While there is often a fundamental mistrust of the state among many religiously conservative home schoolers, there are a considerable number of such people who are willing to compromise with the state. They employ state programs and funds to their own tactical advantage. One of the clearest examples of this is the growing home schooling charter school movement in states such as California. Even though many of the parents involved in such programs believe that they do not want their children to be “brainwashed by a group of educators” and do not want to “leave [their] children off somewhere like a classroom and have them influenced and taught by someone that I am not familiar with” (Huerta, 2000, p.  177), a growing number of Christian conservative parents have become quite adept at taking advantage of government resources. By taking advantage of home school charter programs that connect independent families through the use of the Internet and the Web, they are able to use public funding to support schooling that they had previously had to pay for privately (pp. 179–180). But it is not only the conservative evangelical parents who are using the home schooling charter possibilities for their own benefit. School districts themselves are actively strategizing, employing such technological connections to enhance their revenue flow by maintaining existing enrollments or by actively recruiting home school parents to join a home school charter. For example, by creating a home school charter, one financially pressed small California school district was able to solve a good deal of its economic problems. Over the

246   “We Are the New Oppressed” first two years of its operation, the charter school grew from 80 students to 750 (Huerta, 2000, p. 180). The results were striking. Along with the many new students came a surge of state revenue to the small district, increasing the district’s budget by more than 300 percent. [The home schooling charter] garnered home school families by providing them with a wealth of materials and instructional support. In exchange for resources, families would mail monthly student learning records to the school. Learning records are the lifeline of the school and serve a dual purpose—outlining the academic content completed by students and serving also as an attendance roster from which [the charter school staff] can calculate average daily attendance. . . . Thus, parents’ self-­ reported enrollment data permit [the school district] to receive full capitation grants from the state. (Huerta, 2000, p. 180) In this way, by complying with the minimal reporting requirements, conservative Christian parents are able to act on their desire to keep government and secular influences at a distance; and at the very same time, school districts are able to maintain that the children of these families are enrolled in public schooling and meeting the requirements of secular schooling. We should be cautious of using the word secular here. It is clear from the learning records submitted by the parents that there is widespread use of religious materials in all of the content. Bible readings, devotional lessons, moral teachings directly from online vendors, and so on were widely integrated by the parents within the secular resources provided by the school. “Write and read Luke 1:37, memorize Luke 1:37, prayer journal” are among the many very nonsecular parts of the sample learning records submitted by the parents (Huerta, 2000, p. 188). Such content, and the lack of accountability over it, raises serious questions about the use of public funding for overtly conservative religious purposes. It documents the power of Huerta’s claim that “In an attempt to recast its authority in an era of fewer bureaucratic controls over schools, the state largely drops its pursuit of the common good as public authority is devolved to local families” (2000, p.  192). In the process, technologically linked homes are reconstituted as a “public” school, but a school in which the very meaning of public has been radically transformed so that it mirrors the needs of conservative religious form and content.

Home Schooling as Gendered Labor Even with the strategic use of state resources to assist their efforts, home schooling takes hard work. But to go further we need to ask an important question: Who does the labor? Much of this labor is hidden from view. Finding and organizing materials, teaching, charting progress, establishing and maintaining a “proper” environment, the emotional labor of caring for as well as instructing children—and the list goes on—all of this requires considerable effort. Most of this effort is done by women (Stevens, 2001, p. 15). Because home schooling is largely women’s work, it combines an extraordinary amount of physical, cultural, and emotional labor. It constitutes an intensification of

“We Are the New Oppressed”   247 women’s work in the home because it is added on to the already extensive responsibilities that women have within the home, and especially within conservative religious homes with their division of labor in which men may be active, but are seen as “helpers” of their wives who carry the primary responsibility within the domestic sphere. The demands of such intensified labor have consistently led women to engage in quite creative ways of dealing with their lives. New technologies, as labor saving devices, have played key roles in such creative responses (see Schwartz Cowan, 1983; Strasser, 1982).3 This labor and the meanings attached to it by women themselves need to be situated into a much longer history and a much larger context. A number of people have argued that many women see rightist religious and social positions and the groups that support them as providing a nonthreatening, familiar framework of discourse and practice that centers directly upon what they perceive to be issues of vital and personal concern: immorality, social disorder, crime, the family, and schools. Yet the feelings of personal connection are not sufficient. Rightist action in both the public and the private spheres (see Fraser, 1989, regarding how these concepts themselves are fully implicated in the history of gendered realities, differential power, and struggles) empowers them as women. Depending on the context, they are positioned as “respectable, selfless agents of change deemed necessary, or as independent rebels” (Bacchetta & Power, 2002, p. 6). Historically, right-­wing women have consistently exalted the family. It is seen as a privileged site of women’s self-­realization and power, but one that is threatened by a host of internal and external others. It is the family that is the pillar of society, the foundation of a society’s security, order, and naturalized hierarchy that is given by God (Bacchetta & Power, 2002, p. 8). Usually, fundamentalist and evangelical women are depicted as essentially dedi­ cated to acting on and furthering the goals of religiously conservative men (Brasher, 1998, p.  3). This is much too simplistic. The message is more complex and compelling—and connected to a very clear understanding of the realities of many women’s lives. Women should have not a passive but a very active engagement in their family life and the world that impinges on it. They can and must “shape their husband’s actions and alter disruptive family behaviors.” The latter tasks are becoming especially important because this is a time when all too many men are abdicating their family responsibilities, often impoverishing women and their dependent children (p.  3). Further, only a strong woman could mediate the pressures and the often intensely competitive norms and values that men brought home with them from the world of work. Capitalism may be “God’s economy” (see Apple, 2001), but allowing its norms to dominate the home could be truly destructive. Women, in concert with “respon­ sible” men, could provide the alternative but complementary assemblage of values so necessary to keep the world at bay and to use the family as the foundation for both protecting core religious values and sending forth children armed against the dangers of a secular and profane world. To conservative religious women, what from the outside may look like a restrictive life guided by patriarchal norms, feels very different on the inside. It provides an identity that is embraced precisely because it improves their ability to direct the course of their lives and empowers them in their relationships with others. Thus, intense religiosity is a source of considerable power for many women (Brasher, 1998, pp. 4–5).

248   “We Are the New Oppressed” Based on her extensive research on conservative Christian women, Brasher is very clear on this. As she puts it, [Although such women] insistently claimed that the proper relationship between a woman and her husband is one of submission, they consistently declared that this submission is done out of obedience to God not men and is supposed to be mutual, a relational norm observed by both spouses rather than a capitulation of one to the other. . . . Submission increases rather than decreases a woman’s power within the marital relationship. (1998, p. 6) Divine creation has ordained that women and men are different types of beings. While they complement each other, each has distinctly different tasks to perform. Such sacred gender walls are experienced not as barriers, but as providing and legitimating a space for women’s action and power. Interfering with such action and power in this sphere is also interfering in God’s plan (pp. 12–13). Echoes of this can be found in other times and in other nations. Thus, an activist within the British Union of Fascists—an anti-­Semitic and proto-­Nazi group before World War II—looked back on her activity and said that her active membership demonstrated that she had always been “an independent, free thinking individual” (Gottlieb, 2002, p. 40). This vision of independence of what might be called counterhegemonic thinking is crucial not just then but now as well. It connects with today’s belief among conservative religiously motivated home schoolers that the world and the school have become too PC (politically correct). Bringing conservative evangelical religion back to the core of schooling positions secular schooling as hegemonic. It enables rightist women to interpret their own actions as independent and free thinking—but always in the service of God.

Solving Contradictions One of the elements that keeps the Christian Right such a vital and growing social movement is the distinctive internal structure of evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism combines orthodox Christian beliefs with an intense individualism (Green, 2000, p. 2). This is a key to understanding the ways in which what looks like never-­ending and intensified domestic labor from the outside is interpreted in very different ways from the point of view of conservative religious women who willingly take on the labor of home schooling and add it to their already considerable responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Such conservative ideological forms do see women as subservient to men and as having the primary responsibility of building and defending a vibrant godly “fortress-­home” as part of “God’s plan” (Apple, 2001). But it would be wrong to see women in rightist religious or ideological movements as only being called upon to submit to authority per se. Such obedience is also grounded in a call to act on their duty as women (Enders, 2002, p. 89). This is what might best be seen as activist selflessness, in which the supposedly submerged self reemerges in the activist role of defender of one’s home, family, children, and God’s plan. Lives are made meaningful and

“We Are the New Oppressed”   249 s­ atisfying—and identities supported—in the now reconstituted private and public sphere in this way. There is an extremely long history in the United States and other nations of connecting religious activism and domesticity.4 This has consistently led to mobilizations that cut across political lines that bridge the public and private spheres. In Koven and Michel’s words: Essential to this mobilization was the rise of domestic ideologies stressing women’s differences from men, humanitarian concerns for the conditions of child life and labor, and the emergence of activist interpretations of the gospel . . . [including] evangelicalism, Christian socialism, social Catholicism, and the social gospel. Women’s moral vision, compassion, and capacity to nurture came increasingly to be linked to motherliness. (1993, p. 10) Often guided by a sense of moral superiority, when coupled with a strong element of political commitment, this became a powerful force. Maternalism could be both progressive and retrogressive, often at the same time. While it is the conservative elements of this ideological construction that have come to the fore today, forms of maternalism also had a major impact on many of the progressive programs and legislation that currently exist (see, e.g., Kessler-­Harris, 2001; Koven & Michel, 1993; Ladd-­Taylor, 1994). The restorative powers of domesticity and “female spirituality” could be combined with a strong commitment both to democratic principles and education and opportunities for women (Koven & Michel, 1993, p.  17). The key was and is how democracy—a sliding signifier—is defined. Protecting and educating one’s children, caring for the intimate and increasingly fragile bonds of community and family life, worries about personal safety, and all of this in an exploitative and often disrespectful society—these themes are not only the province of the right and should not be only the province of women. But we have to ask how identifiable people are mobilized around and by these themes, and by whom. The use of a kind of maternalist discourse and a focus on women’s role as mother and as someone whose primary responsibility is in the home and the domestic sphere does not necessarily prevent women from exercising power in the public sphere. In fact, it can serve as a powerful justification for such action and actually reconstitutes the public sphere. Educating one’s children at home so that they are given armor to equip them to transform their and others’ lives outside the home, establishes the home as a perfect model for religiously motivated ethical conduct for all sets of social institutions (see Apple, 2001). This tradition, what has been called social housekeeping, can then claim responsibility for non-­familial social spaces and can extend the idealized mothering role of women well beyond the home. In Marijke du Toit’s words, it was and can still be used to forge “a new, more inclusive definition of the political” (2002, p. 67). Such maternalism historically enabled women to argue for a measure of direct power in the redefined public arena. One could extol the virtues of domesticity and expand what counts as a home at the same time. Thus, the state and many institutions in the public sphere were “a household where women should exercise their . . . superior skills to create [both] order [and a better society]” (du Toit, 2002, p. 67).5

250   “We Are the New Oppressed” All of this helps us make sense of why many of the most visible home school advocates devote a good deal of their attention to “making sense of the social category of motherhood.” As a key part of “a larger script of idealized family relations, motherhood is a lead role in God’s plan” for authoritarian populist religious conservatives (Stevens, 2001, p. 76). Again in Stevens’s words, “One of the things that home schooling offers, then, is a renovated domesticity—a full-­time motherhood made richer by the tasks of teaching, and [by] some of the status that goes along with those tasks” (p. 83). Yet it is not only the work internal to the home that is important here. Home schooling is outward looking as well in terms of women’s tasks. In many instances, home schooling is a collective project. It requires organizational skills to coordinate connections and cooperative activities (support groups, field trips, play groups, time off from the responsibilities that mothers have, etc.) and to keep the movement itself vibrant at local and regional levels. Here too, women do the largest amount of the work. This has led to other opportunities for women as advocates and entrepreneurs. Thus, the development and marketing of some of the most popular curriculum packages, management guides, self-­help and devotional materials, and so on has been done by women. Indeed, the materials reflect the fact that home schooling is women’s work, with a considerable number of the pictures in the texts and promotional material showing mothers and children together (Stevens, 2001, pp.  83–96). A considerable number of the national advocates for evangelically based home schooling are activist women as well.

Marketing God Advocacy is one thing—being able to put the advocated policy into practice is quite another. In order to actually do home schooling a large array of plans, materials, advice, and even solace must be made available. “Godly schooling” creates a market. Even with the burgeoning market for all kinds of home schooling, it is clear that conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists have the most to choose from in terms of educational and religious (the separation is often fictional) curricula, lessons, books, and inspirational material (Stevens, 2001, p. 54). Such materials not only augment the lessons that home schooling parents develop, but increasingly they become the lessons in mathematics, literacy, science, social studies, and all of the other subjects that are taught. This kind of material also usually includes homework assignments and tests as well as all of the actual instructional material. Thus, a complete package can be assembled or purchased whole in a way that enables committed parents to create an entire universe of educational experiences that is both rigorously sequenced and tightly controlled—and prevents unwanted “pollution” from the outside world. The A Beka Book program provides a clear example. An offshoot of Pensacola Christian College, it markets material for nursery school up to the end of secondary school. It offers the home schooler a curriculum in which Christian teachings are woven into every aspect of knowledge. Little is left to chance. Preschool children learn through the use of Bible story flannelgraphs. At the age of five, they begin a complete Bible curriculum and as they move up in age their texts include Bible Doctrines for Today and Managing Your Life Under God. The elementary level science textbooks,

“We Are the New Oppressed”   251 God’s World, are based on an inerrantist approach to the Bible and a literalist reading of Genesis and creation—one in which evolution is dismissed. The difference between right and wrong is seen as answerable only through reference to biblical teachings (Stevens, 2001, p. 55). Easily ordered on the Web, similar kinds of material are made available by other religiously based publishers—Bob Jones University Press, Christian Liberty Academy, Alpha Omega Publications, KONOS, the Weaver Curriculum Series, and a number of others. While there are pedagogic differences among these sets of materials, all of them are deeply committed to integrating biblical messages, values, and training throughout the entire curriculum. Most not only reproduce the particular biblically based worldviews of the parents, but also create an educational environment that relies on a particular vision of “appropriate” schooling, one that is organized around highly sequenced formal lessons that have an expressly moral aim. Technological resources such as videos are marketed that both provide the home schooler with a model of how education should be done and the resources for actually carrying it out (Stevens, 2001, p. 56). The organizational form that is produced here is very important. As I have argued elsewhere (Apple, 2001), because much of the religiously conservative home schooling movement has a sense of purity and danger in which all elements of the world have a set place, such an organization of both knowledge and pedagogy embodies the ideological structure underlying the evangelical universe. As Bernstein (1977) reminds us, it is often in the form of the curriculum that the social cement that organizes our consciousness at its most basic level is reproduced. While the form of the curriculum is clearly a collection code in key ways (Bernstein, 1977), the content is partly integrated. Project methods are also used in many conservative home schoolers’ practices. For example, at the same time as parents may use the detailed sequential curriculum purchased from the Weaver Curriculum Series because it enables lessons to be related as well to a sequential reading of the Bible, these same parents also approve of the ways in which such curricular material includes creative ideas for student projects. Thus, one parent had her children engage in brick-­making as part of the study of the Tower of Babel. She also used the genealogies of the Old Testament to stimulate her children’s study of their family tree (Stevens, 2001, p. 58). This kind of integration is found in nearly all of the widely used material. Stevens clearly describes a common situation. By creative elaboration, curriculum authors spin out a wide range of lessons from biblical passages. Every word and phrase can be a metaphor for a revered character trait, a starting point for a science lesson. In this instance the first line of the first verse of the Sermon on the Mount, “Seeing the crowds, he went up the mountain,” commences lessons on sight, light, and the biological structure of the eye, as well as character studies on the virtues of alertness. [The parent] noted that her children’s “entire curriculum will be Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Through high school.” Detailed lesson plans provide project descriptions and learning guides for children of various ages, so that the whole family can do the same lesson at once. “Our part in this,” [the parent] explained, “is to read through the booklet.” (2001, pp. 58–59)

252   “We Are the New Oppressed” This sense of the importance of structured educational experiences that are infused with strong moral messages is not surprising given the view of a secular world filled with possible sins, temptations, and dangers. The emphasis then on equipping children with an armor of strong belief supports a pedagogical belief that training is a crucial pedagogic act. While children’s interests have to be considered, these are less important than preparing children for living in a world where God’s word rules. This commitment to giving an armor of “right beliefs” “nourishes demands for school material” (Stevens, 2001, p.  60). A market for curriculum materials, workbooks, lesson plans, rewards for doing fine work such as merit badges, videotapes and CDs, and so many other things that make home schooling seem more doable is created not only out of a strategy of aggressive marketing and of using the Internet as a major mechanism for such marketing; but it is also created and stimulated because of the ideological and emotional elements that underpin the structures of feeling that help organize the conservative evangelical home schooler’s world (see Apple, 2001).

Technology and the Realities of Daily Life Of course, parents are not puppets. While the parent may purchase or download material that is highly structured and inflexible, by the very nature of home schooling, parents are constantly faced with the realities of their children’s lives, their boredom, their changing interests. Here, chat rooms and Internet resources become even more important. Advice manuals, prayers, suggestions for how one should deal with recalcitrant children, and biblically motivated inspirational messages about how important the hard work of parenting is and how one can develop the patience to keep doing it—all of this provides ways of dealing with the immense amount of educational and especially emotional labor that home schooling requires. The technology enables women who may be rather isolated in the home due to the intense responsibilities of home schooling to have virtual but still intimate emotional connections. It also requires skill—something that ratifies the vision of self that often accompanies home schooling parents. We don’t need “experts”; with hard work and creative searching we can engage in a serious and disciplined education by ourselves. Thus, the technology provides for solace, acknowledging and praying for each other’s psychic wounds and tensions—and at the same time enhances one’s identity as someone who is intellectually worthy, who can wisely choose appropriate knowledge and values. What, hence, may seem like a form of anti-­intellectualism is in many ways exactly the opposite. Its rejection of the secular expertise of the school and the state is instead based on a vision of knowledgeable parents—especially mothers who have a kind of knowledge taken from the ultimate source, God. Thus, one of the most popular of the evangelically oriented websites that markets products for home schoolers sells such things as “The Go-­to-the-­Ant Chart.” The wall chart contains pictures of common situations and biblical passages that speak to them. A list of the topics that the chart covers speaks to the realities that home schooling parents often face—serving God, gratefulness, honesty, perseverance, obedience, thoroughness, responsibility, initiative, consideration, and redeeming time. In language that not only home schooling parents will understand, it says:

“We Are the New Oppressed”   253 This chart arms parents with Scripture for working with the easily distracted or “less than diligent” child. The chart covers every area of laziness we could think of, plus a Bible verse for each problem for easy reference when they are driving you crazy! Take your child to the chart, identify his slothful action or attitude, read what God says about it, and pray for his strength to obey. (http://doorposts.net/g_to_and.htm) It is important to note that the Internet is not only an effective tool for marketing and for movement building, and as I have just noted, for dealing with the emotional and intellectual labor home schooling requires. Just as importantly, it has become an extremely powerful tool for advocacy work and lobbying. Thus, the Home School Legal Defense Association has been at the forefront of not only home schooling, but in active and aggressive efforts to coordinate lobbyists inside and outside the Washington Beltway. The HSLDA’s Congressional Action Program has proven how powerful and responsive a tool such as the Internet can be in mobilizing for and against congressional and state laws and in defending the interests of its conservative positions (Stevens, 2001, pp.  178–179).6 However, once again, such mobilizing about home schooling needs to be situated within its larger context if we are not to miss some crucial connections between conservative-­oriented home schooling and the more extensive authoritarian movement of which it is a key part. In this regard, it is worthwhile remembering what I noted earlier—that one of the most visible leaders of the home school movement nationally is Michael Farris. Farris plays a crucial leadership role in the HSLDA (Green, Rozell, & Wilcox, 2000) and is the president of Patrick Henry College. Patrick Henry is a college largely for religiously conservative home schooled students and it has one academic major—government. The principles that animate its educational activities are quite clear in the following description: The Vision of Patrick Henry College is to aid in the transformation of American society by training Christian students to serve God and mankind with a passion for righteousness, justice and mercy, through careers of public service and cultural influence. The Distinctives of Patrick Henry College include practical apprenticeship methodology; a deliberate outreach to home schooled students; financial independence; a general education core based on the classical liberal arts; a dedication to mentoring and disciplining Christian students; and a community life that promotes virtue, leadership, and strong, lifelong commitments to God, family and society. The Mission of the Department of Government is to promote practical application of biblical principles and the original intent of the founding documents of the American republic, while preparing students for lives of public service, advocacy and citizen leadership. (http://www.phc.edu/about/FundamentalStatements.asp) These aims are both laudable and worrisome. Create an environment where students learn to play active roles in reconstructing both their own lives and the larger society, but make certain that the society they wish to build is based wholly on principles that

254   “We Are the New Oppressed” are not open to social criticism by nonbelievers. Only those anointed by their particular version of God and only a society built upon the vision held by the anointed are legitimate. All else is sinful. Thus, for all its creative uses of technology, its understanding of “market needs” and how to fill them, its personal sacrifices, the immense labor of the (mostly) women who are engaged in the work of actually doing it, and its rapid growth fostered by good press and creative mobilizing strategies, a good deal of home schooling speaks the language of authoritarian populism. There’s an inside and an outside, and for many authoritarian populists, the only way to protect the inside is to change the outside so that it mirrors the religious impulses and commitments of the inside. Doing this is hard political, educational, and emotional work, and new technologies clearly are playing a growing role in such personal and social labor.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined a number of the complexities involved in the cultural and political efforts within a rapidly growing movement that has claimed subaltern status. This has involved critically analyzing a set of technological resources—the Internet—and situating it within the social context of its use within a specific community and by specific people within that community. In so doing, I have suggested that in order to understand the social meaning and uses of these technologies, we need to examine the social movement that provides the context for their use and the identities that are being constructed within that social movement. I have also argued that we need to critically analyze the kind of labor that is required in home schooling, who is engaged in such labor, and how such labor is interpreted by the actors who perform it. Only in this way can we understand the lived problems such technologies actually solve. I have pointed to how the space for production of such “solutions” is increasingly occupied by ideological and/or commercial interests that have responded to and enlarged a market to fill the needs of religiously conservative home schoolers. A good deal of my focus has been on the work of mothers—of “Godly women”— who have actively created new identities for themselves (and their children and husbands)7 and have found in new technologies solutions to a huge array of difficult personal and political problems in their daily lives. Such Godly women are not that much different from any of us, but they are “dedicated to securing for themselves and their families a thoroughly religious and conservative life” (Brasher, 1998, p. 29). And they do this with uncommon sacrifice and creativity. The picture I have presented is complicated; but then so too is reality. One of the dynamics we are seeing is social disintegration, that is, the loss of legitimacy of a dominant institution that supposedly bound us together—the common school. Yet, and very importantly, what we are also witnessing is the use of the Internet not to detraditionalize society, but in the cases I have examined here, to retraditionalize parts of it. However, to call this phenomenon simply retraditionalization is to miss the ways in which such technologies are also embedded not only in traditional values and structures of feeling. They are also participating in a more “modern” project, one in which self-­actualized individualism intersects with the history of social maternalism, which itself intersects with the reconstitution of masculinities as well.

“We Are the New Oppressed”   255 Such maternalism needs to be seen as both positive and negative, and not only in its partial revivification of elements of patriarchal relations—although obviously this set of issues must not be ignored in any way. We need to respect the labor and the significant sacrifices of home schooling mothers and the fathers as well (the question of altered masculinities in home schooling families is an important topic that needs to be focused upon in a way that complements what I have done here). This sensitivity to the complexities and contradictions that are so deeply involved in what these religiously motivated parents are attempting is perhaps best seen in the words of Jean Hardisty when she reflects on populist rightist movements in general. I continue to believe that, within that movement, there are people who are decent and capable of great caring, who are creating community and finding coping strategies that are enabling them to lead functional lives in a cruel and uncaring late capitalist environment. (1999, pp. 2–3) However, recognizing such caring, labor, and sacrifice—and the creative uses of technologies that accompany them—should not make us lose sight of what this labor and these sacrifices also produce. Godly technologies, godly schooling, and godly identities can be personally satisfying and make life personally meaningful in a world in which traditions are either destroyed or commodified, but at what cost to those who don’t share the ideological vision that seems so certain in the minds of those who produce it?

Notes 1. I would like to thank Harry Brighouse, Kurt Squire, and the members of the Friday Seminar for their comments on this chapter. An earlier draft was presented at the Wisconsin/London/ Melbourne Joint Seminar on New Technologies, Madison, Wisconsin, October 6, 2003. 2. The right has been in the forefront of the use of the Internet for creating linkages among existing members on key issues of concern. In understanding that youth are among the heaviest users of the Internet, conservative organizations have creatively employed such technology to build sophisticated websites whose form and content appeal to youth (Hardisty, 1999, p. 46). 3. Actually, many of these technologies in fact were not labor saving ultimately. See Schwarz Cowan (1983) and Strasser (1982). 4. Much of this literature, however, draws upon the experiences of white women. The meaning of domesticity and the discourses of motherhood among black women cannot be understood from the standpoint of dominant groups. For more on this crucial point, see Boris (1993). Since the vast majority of right-­wing home schoolers are indeed white, I have drawn upon a literature that is based on their experiences. 5. I would like to thank Rima D. Apple for her helpful comments on this section. 6. One of the most powerful figures in HSLDA is Michael Farris. He acts as both a public spokesperson for conservative home schoolers and as a legal advocate in court cases around the country. Farris has a long history of rightist activism. He ran for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1993 on a strikingly conservative platform. Interestingly enough, he did not receive the endorsement of a number of other conservative Christian groups and national figures who believed that his public positions might alienate swing voters and actually harm the rightist cause. See Rozell and Wilcox (1996). 7. I am not assuming the normative heterosexual family here. There is no literature on gay and lesbian home schoolers. Given the ideological position that the vast majority of conservative evangelicals take on the question of sexuality, I am simply reflecting their own assumptions.

256   “We Are the New Oppressed”

References Apple, M. W. (2001). Educating the “right” way. New York: Routledge. Apple, M. W. et al. (2003). The state and the politics of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Amenta, E., & Young, M. P. (1999). Making an impact: Conceptual and methodological implications of the collective goods criterion. In M. Guigni, D. McAdam, and C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. 22–41). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bacchetta, P., & Power, M. (2002). Introduction. In P. Baccetta & M. Power (Eds.), Right-­wing women (pp. 1–15). New York: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1977). Class, codes, and control (Vol. 3, 2nd Ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Binder, A. (2002). Contentious curricula. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boris, E. (1993). The power of motherhood: Black and white activist women redefine the “political.” In S. Koven & S. Michel (Eds.), Mothers of a new world (pp.  213–245). New York: Routledge. Brasher, B. (1998). Godly women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bromley, H., & Apple, M. W. (Eds.). (1998). Education/technology/power. Albany. State University of New York Press. Castells, M. (1996). The rise of network society (Vol. 1). New York: Oxford University Press. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. du Toit, M. (2002). Framing volksmoeders. In P. Bacchetta & M. Power (Eds.), Right-­wing women (pp. 57–70). New York: Routledge. Enders, V. (2002). And we ate up the world. In P. Bacchetta & M Power (Eds.), Right-­wing women (pp. 85–98). New York: Routledge. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Giugni, M. (1999). How social movements matter: Past research, present problems, and future developments. In M. Guigni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. xiii–xxxiii). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Godwin, M. (2003). Cyber rights. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gottlieb, J. (2002). Female “fanatics.” In P. Bacchetta & M. Power (Eds.), Right-­wing women (pp. 29–41). New York: Routledge. Green, J. (2000). The Christian right and 1998 elections. In J. Green, M. Rozell, & C. Wilcox (Eds.), Prayers in the precincts (pp. 1–19). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Green, J., Rozell, M., & Wilcox, C. (2000). Prayers in the precincts. Washington, DC: George­ town University Press. Hakken, D. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. Hardisty, J. (1999). Mobilizing resentment. Boston: Beacon Press. Huerta, L. (2000). Losing public accountability: A home schooling charter. In B. Fuller (Ed.), Inside charter schools (pp. 177–202). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jordan, T. (1999). Cyberpower. New York: Routledge. Kessler-­Harris, A. (2001). In pursuit of equity. New York: Oxford University Press. Koven, S., & Michel, S. (Eds.). (1993). Mothers of a new world: Maternalist politics and the origins of the welfare state. New York: Routledge. Ladd-­Taylor, M. (1994) Mother-­work. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. McAdam, D. (1999). The biographical impact of activism. In M. Guigni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. 119–146). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Meyer, D. S. (1999). How the Cold War was really won: The effects of the antinuclear movements of the 1980s. In M. Guigni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. 182–203). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“We Are the New Oppressed”   257 Moore, K. (1999). Political protest and institutional change. In M. Guigni, D. McAdam, & C. Tilly (Eds.), How social movements matter (pp. 97–115). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rozell, M., & Wilcox, C. (1996). Second coming. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schwartz Cowan, R. (1983). More work for mother. New York: Basic Books. Slevin, J. (2000). The internet and society. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Smith, C. (1998). American evangelicalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stevens, M. (2001). Kingdom of children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strasser, S. (1982). Never done. New York: Pantheon. Wilcox, C., & Rozell, M. (2000). Conclusion: The Christian right in campaign ’98. In J. Green, M. Rozell, & C. Wilcox (Eds.), Prayers in the precincts (pp.  287–297). Washington, DC: ­Georgetown University Press.

14 Global Crises, Social Justice, and Teacher Education

When the U.S. government released its 2007 census figures in January 2010, it reported that 12% of the U.S. population—more than 38 million people—were foreign born. Firstgeneration people were now one out of every eight persons in the nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). This near-­record transformation, one in which diasporic populations now constitute a large and growing percentage of communities throughout the nation and an ever-­growing proportion of children in our schools, documents one of the most profound reasons that we must think globally about education. This transformation is actually something of which we should be proud. The United States and a number of other nations are engaged in a vast experiment that has rarely been attempted before. Can we build a nation and a culture from resources and people from all over the world? The impacts of these global population flows on education and on teacher education are visible all around us. No discussion of globalization and its relation to teacher education can be sufficient without an understanding of globalization in general.1 Because of this, in this article I want to do a number of things. First, I want to argue for a broader understanding of globalization and its effects and point to some implications that this has for teachers and teacher educators as they try to comprehend and act on their changing situations. Second, I shall remind us of some “first principles” that should guide our understanding and actions. Third, I will point to some key works that should be required reading for anyone who wants to take seriously the realities of the effects of globalization on many of the countries and regions from where new populations may come. And, finally, I provide a detailed set of tasks in which critically democratic educators and researchers need to engage if we are to take seriously our responsibilities in building and defending institutions, practices, and intellectual/political traditions that will enable us to understand and act on current realities. My agenda is a large one. Because of this, I can only outline a series of steps toward more critical understandings of globalization. But our problems are large as well. In my notes and references, I provide further resources that are critical for going further into the issues I raise.

Understanding Globalization If one were to name an issue that can be found near the top of the list of crucial topics within the critical education literature, it would be globalization. It is a word with extraordinary currency. This is the case not only because of trendiness. Exactly

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   259 the opposite is true. It has become ever more clear that education cannot be understood without recognizing that nearly all educational policies and practices are strongly influenced by an increasingly integrated international economy that is subject to severe crises; that reforms and crises in one country have significant effects in others; and that immigration and population flows from one nation or area to another have tremendous impacts on what counts as official knowledge, what counts as a responsive and effective education, what counts as appropriate teaching, and the list could continue for quite a while (see Burbules & Torres, 2009; Dale & Robertson, 2009; Peters, 2005; Rhoads & Torres, 2006). Indeed, as I show in Educating the “Right” Way (Apple, 2006) and Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (Apple, 2010a), all of these social and ideological dynamics and many more are now fundamentally restructuring what education does, how it is controlled, and who benefits from it throughout the world. While localities and national systems affect the processes of globalization differently and provide different contexts for struggles, a homogenization of educational policies and practices, driven by what Santos (2003) calls “monocultural logics,” is very clearly evident within and between settings. These logics are very visible in current education policies both inside and outside of teacher education that privilege choice, competition, performance management, individual responsibility, and “risk management,” as well as a series of attacks on the cultural gains made by dispossessed groups (Apple, Ball, & Gandin, 2010). Neoliberal, neoconservative, and managerial impulses can be found throughout the world, cutting across both geographical boundaries and even economic systems. This points to the important “spatial” aspects of globalization. Policies are “borrowed” and “travel” across borders in such a way that these neoliberal, neoconservative, and managerial impulses are extended throughout the world, and alternative or oppositional forms and practices are marginalized or attacked (Gulson & Symes, 2007, p.  9). The fact that the attacks by conservative think tanks on teacher education institutions in the United States are now surfacing in many other nations documents part of this dynamic. The additional fact that performance pay for teachers is now part of official government policy in China at the same time that it is having major effects in discussions of and policies on teaching in the United States is yet another indication of the ways in which policies concerning teaching and teacher education travel well beyond their original borders. The insight that stands behind the focus on globalization in general can perhaps best be summarized in the words of a character in a novel about the effects of the British Empire (Rushdie, 1981). To paraphrase what he says, “The problem with the English is that they don’t understand that their history constantly occurs outside their borders.” We could easily substitute words such as “Americans” and others for “English.” There is a growing literature on globalization and education. This is undoubtedly important, and a significant portion of this literature has provided us with powerful understandings of the realities and histories of empire and postcolonialism(s); the interconnected flows of capital, populations, knowledge, and differential power and the ways in which thinking about the local requires that we simultaneously think about the

260   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education global. But as I argue in the next section of this article, a good deal of it does not go far enough into the realities of the global crises so many people are experiencing, or it assumes that the crises and their effects on education are the same throughout the world. Indeed, the concept of globalization itself needs to be historicized and seen as partly hegemonic, since at times its use fails to ground itself in “the asymmetries of power between nations and colonial and neo-­colonial histories, which see differential national effects of neoliberal globalization” (Lingard, 2007, p. 239). This is not only analytically and empirically problematic, but it may also cause us to miss the possible roles that critical teacher education—and critical education and mobilizations around it in general—can play in mediating and challenging the differential benefits that the crises are producing in many different locations. Any discussion of these issues needs to be grounded in the complex realities of various nations and regions and in the realities of the social, cultural, and educational movements and institutions of these nations and regions. Doing less than that means that we all too often simply throw slogans at problems rather than facing the hard realities of what needs to be done—and what is being done now. But slogans about globalization and what is needed to help teacher educators and our current and future teachers understand its nature and effects are certainly not sufficient given current realities. One of the main problems is that teachers and teacher educators are left with all-­ too-general stereotypes about “what diasporic children and their parents are like” and what the conditions are in the places from which they come. But effective teaching requires not only that we understand students, their communities, and their histories where they live now but also that we understand the sum of their experiences before they came to the United States. Superficial knowledge may not be much better than no knowledge at all. It may also paint a picture of parents and youth as passive “victims” of global forces, rather than as people who are active agents continually struggling both in their original nations and regions and here in the United States to build a better life for themselves, their communities, and their children. Thus, teachers and teacher educators need to know much more about the home countries—and about the movements, politics, and multiple cultural traditions and conflicts from where diasporic populations come. Let me give an example. In my own university, the fastest growing minor for students enrolled in our elementary teacher education program is Spanish. This is based on a recognition of the ways in which global flows of people from the South to the North are having profound effects on educational policies and practices and on the resources that current and future teachers require given this. I do not want to speak against this choice of a minor at all. Indeed, I have a good deal of respect for future and current teachers who are willing to engage with diasporic students in “their own language.” But the final words in the above paragraph speak powerfully to my point about knowing more about the politics and multiple cultural traditions of home countries. Many of the students from, say, Mexico and other Latin American nations speak indigenous languages as their first language. Spanish is their second language. In their home countries and regions, there are powerful movements among indigenous groups and their progressive allies to defend these languages and cultures. Not understanding

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   261 this political history and the cultural traditions and struggles associated with it can lead teachers to assume that students being taught in Spanish who do not do well in spite of this are “less intelligent,” are in need of “special education” and other interventions. Having a much more detailed sense of and sensibility toward the complexities of the regions from which students come and the political and cultural movements and struggles there would be absolutely essential for creating curricular and teaching practices that are culturally relevant (see Apple & Beane, 2007; Ladson-­Billings, 1994). But this would also help prevent us from misrecognizing the actions of parents and communities in the areas in which the schools sit and the areas from where the people originally may have come. This recognition of agency, of people and movements actively engaged in building a better future both “here and there,” would go a long way in reducing the tendencies among many educators in the United States to assume that they have nothing to learn from the global flows of people who are now transforming our nation and so many others. This is a crucial point. Major transformations in education and social life are going on in those nations and regions from where so many people are coming. Those of us in education here have much to learn about how we might transform our own often overly bureaucratic and at times strikingly unequal institutions by looking at other nations’ experiences and seeing people who have come from these nations as resources, not only as problems. Let me give an example here. There are powerful models that specify more critical moments and processes in education from which we could learn, with the work of Luis Armando Gandin on the justly well-­known reforms in Porto Alegre, Brazil (see, e.g., Apple et al., 2003; Apple, Au, & Gandin, 2009; Gandin, 2006; Gandin & Apple, 2003), and Mario Novelli’s (2007) discussion of the ways in which trade union activism led to critical learning and new identities in Colombia being among the more important. Gandin’s analysis of the reforms in Porto Alegre—reforms that are having important influences throughout Latin America—has major implications for teaching and teacher education, since the growth and acceptance of more critically democratic educational policies and practices there could not have been accomplished without the participation of a core of well-­prepared and critically reflexive teachers. We have much to learn from these reforms that link together major critically democratic transformations in both social and educational policy and practice and in the close connections between teacher education and these transformations. The account that Kenneth Zeichner and Lars Dahlstrom (1999) give of the limits and possibilities of more democratic teacher education in parts of Africa also serves as a good example of the kind of work that needs to be done as well. These examples of critical work in nations outside the United States should not make us assume that discussions of globalization are only about “other” countries. Any complete analysis of the United States needs to be situated in the global realities here. This involves a probing investigation of an increasingly diverse society, one where major economic changes and the realities of multiculturalism, “race,” “diaspora,” and immigration play crucial roles, as does the fact that even with the legacy of such policies as No Child Left Behind there is relatively weak central governmental control over education. Economic transformations, the creation of both paid and casualized and often racialized labor markets that are increasingly internationalized and unequal,

262   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education demands for new worker identities and skills—and all of this in a time of severe economic crisis—are having profound effects (Apple, 2010a). None of this can be understood without also recognizing the ways in which the realities of the United States are influenced and often shaped by our connections with economic, political, and cultural policies, movements, and struggles outside our official borders. A critical question remains, however. How are we to understand these global realities and relations critically? This requires that we also criticize some of the accepted tenets of critical analysis in education itself. In some of the critical literature, there seems to be an unstated assumption that one can comprehend global realities through the use of a single lens—through class politics or gender or race—or more lamentably, that poststructural analyses are total replacements for structural understandings. Yet no one dynamic nor one single theory is sufficient (Apple, 2006; 2010b). It is the intersection of and sometimes contractions among multiple dynamics and histories—what is called in the literature on critical race theory “intersectionality” (Gillborn, 2008)— where we can find a more adequate sensitivity to the utter complexities surrounding globalization and its effects. When one adds to this a set of compelling understandings of “empire” and colonial and postcolonial realities (Apple, 2010a), we get much closer to the complex foundations of the growing transformations of populations in the United States and other nations and the ways in which they understand the world and their place in it (see Apple, 2000; Apple & Buras, 2006; Fraser, 1997; Gillborn, 2008; Leonardo, 2009; Rege, 2003; Stambach, 2000). These complexities require an analysis of many things that are foundational for a more thorough comprehension of what we face in education and of the causes of these conditions: political economy and the structure of paid and unpaid work both in the United States and in the countries from where diasporic people come; the ways in which these realities are structured and experienced differently around such markers as class, gender, race, region, and increasingly religion; the identities that people bring with them and the ways in which these identities are transformed in the process of building a life here; and the fact that many people have hybrid identities based on their experiences of constantly crossing geographical borders as they go back and forth between countries, living basically in both (see, e.g., Lee, 2005, 2009; Sarroub, 2005; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008; Vélez-Ibáñez & Sampaio, 2002). Because of all this, the situation we face in education also demands a rich mix of theoretical and critical traditions, all of them appropriately political, that deal with both of the sets of dynamics that Nancy Fraser (1997) had identified as crucial to the reconstruction of our core institutions: the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition. The first refers to the ways in which the economy works, how it is controlled, and who benefits from it. The second deals with cultural struggles over identity, the gaining or denial of respect, and the basic ways in which people are recognized or misrecognized as fully human and deserving of rights. Of course, there are those who would reject this more integrative approach, who believe that there is only one way a critical scholar/activist can be legitimately critical. For them, an approach that seeks to deal respectfully with and learn from critical theories and resources from multiple sources and multiple critical traditions is misguided. For me and many others, however, the key is to heed Fraser’s (1997) aforementioned

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   263 absolutely imperative call for a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition in ways that do not interrupt each other. Such an approach, one in which individuals learn respectfully from one another and respectfully disagree when necessary, is not an example of losing one’s political soul. Indeed, as I have said before, while we need to be very cautious about theories that turn the world into simply discourses and that fly above the gritty materialities of real life, we are not in a church so we should not be worried about heresy (Apple, 2006). The key is the relationship between one’s nuanced understanding and one’s concrete political/educational action—and a willingness to build alliances and participate in the social agendas of other groups who suffer from the structures of this society. This will require using theoretical/political resources that are varied but still intensely political and committed. Without expanding our critical theoretical and empirical resources, we will not be able to answer two of the most crucial questions facing educators and activists today: What do the global realities that increasingly challenge education and teacher education look like? And, what can we as educators and community members do to alter these realities?

Facing Reality Before we go further, however, it is important to face reality, both in terms of the ways many educators, even many progressives who say that they are committed to social justice in education, misrecognize the nature of educational reform in terms of the daily lives of millions upon millions of people throughout the world. Let us be honest. Much of the literature on educational reform, including much of the mainstream literature in teacher education, exists in something of a vacuum. It fails to place schooling sufficiently in its social and political context, thereby evacuating any serious discussion of why schooling in so many nations plays the complex roles that it does. Class and gender relations, racializing dynamics and structures, political economy, discussions of empire and colonialism, and the connections between the state and civil society, for example, are sometimes hard to find or when they are found seem to be words that are not attached to any detailed analysis of how these dynamics actually work. But this absence is not the more mainstream literature’s only problem. It is all too often romantic, assuming both that education can drive economic transformations and that reforming schools by only focusing on the schools themselves and the teachers within them is sufficient. Policies that assume that instituting such things as performance pay for teachers or marketizing teacher education will basically solve the educational crises in inner cities provide clear examples of this tendency. When policy limits our attention only to schools, it cuts us off from powerful external interventions made in educational movements in communities among oppressed people. The naiveté of these positions is not only ahistorical; these positions also act as conceptual blocks that prevent us from focusing on the real social, ideological, and economic conditions to which education has a dialectical and profoundly intricate set of connections (Anyon, 2005). A concern for social justice may then become more rhetorical than its proponents would like. One of the most important steps in understanding what this means is to reposition oneself to see the world as it looks like from below, not above. Closely connected to

264   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education this is another step, one that is directly related to the topic of this essay. We need to think internationally, not only to see the world from below, but to see the social world relationally.2 In essence, this requires that we understand that in order for there to be a “below” in one nation, this usually requires that there be an “above” both in that nation and in those nations with which it is connected in the global political economy. Indeed, this demand that educators think relationally and face the realities of the global political, economic, and cultural context has been one of the generative impulses behind the growth of critical analyses of the relationship between globalization and education in the first place (Apple, 2010a; Apple, Kenway, & Singh, 2005). Any future or current teachers who wish to take the issue of teaching in a global world seriously need to understand global realities much better than they often do today. For example, in Cultural Politics and Education (Apple, 1996), I spend a good deal of time discussing the relationship among “cheap French fries,” the internationalization of the production of farm commodities, and the production of inequalities inside and outside of education. I focus on the connections between the lack of schools, well-­educated teachers, health care, decent housing, and similar kinds of things in one particular Asian nation—all of which lead to immense immiseration—and the constant pressure to drive down the cost of labor in the imperial center. My basic point is that the connections between the exploitation of identifiable groups of people in the “Third World” and the demand for cheap commodities—in this case potatoes—here in the United States may not be readily visible, but they are none-the-less real and extremely damaging. We might think of it as the “Wal-­Martization” of the world economy. Powerful descriptions of these relations are crucial, and as conditions worsen, some deeply committed scholars are bearing witness to these realities in compelling ways. Perhaps one particularly powerful author’s work can serve as an example. It is a book that should be required reading for any teacher and teacher educator who wants to get a clearer picture of the conditions of people’s lives and of the resiliency and struggles in many of those nations and regions from where new populations are coming. If ever there was a doubt in anyone’s mind about the growth of these truly distressing conditions, Mike Davis’s volume Planet of Slums (2006) makes this reality crystal clear. At the same time, Davis powerfully illuminates both the extent of, and what it means to live (exist is a better word) in, the immiserating conditions created by our need for such things as the “cheap French fries” that I pointed to. Let me say more about Davis’s arguments, since many of them stand at the very root of a more adequate understanding of the realities a vast number of people face throughout the world. Davis provides us with a powerful analysis of political economy, of structures of dominance, one of the key elements that I mentioned in building an adequate understanding of globalization. And he does this not simply by rhetorically challenging the economic, housing, ecological, educational, and other policies that are advanced by international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF ) and by dominant groups within the “less developed” world. Rather, Davis draws together empirical and historical evidence that demonstrates time and again not only the negative effects of dominant policies but also—given the realities of poor peoples’ lives—why such policies cannot succeed (see also Apple et al., 2009; Robertson & Dale, 2009). And he does this by placing all of these proposals for reform directly into the

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   265 contradictory necessities of daily life in the increasingly large and growing slums throughout the “less developed” world. One third of the global urban population now lives in slums. Even more staggering is the fact that more than 78% of urbanites in the least developed countries live in slums (Davis, 2006, p.  23). The economic crisis in these slums is experienced by the people living there in ways that are extraordinarily powerful. Rather than thinking about “jobs” in the usual sense of that term, it is better to think of “informal survivalism” as the major mode of existence in a majority of Third World cities (Davis, 2006, p. 178). Echoing the situation I described at the beginning of this section, Davis (2006) is clear on what is happening throughout the Third World: As local safety nets disappeared, poor farmers became increasingly vulnerable to any exogenous shock: drought, inflation, rising interest rates, or falling commodity prices. Or illness: an estimated 60 percent of Cambodian small peasants who sell their land and move to the city are forced to do so by medical debts. (p. 15) This understanding allows him to show the dilemmas and struggles that people must face every day, dilemmas and struggles that should force us to recognize that for the poor certain words that we consider nouns are better thought of as verbs. Take “housing,” for example. It is not a thing. Rather, it is the result of a complex, ongoing—and often dangerous—trade-­off among contradictory needs. Thus, the urban poor who live in the slums “have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and . . . personal safety.” And while the very worst situation “is a . . . bad location without [government] services or security” (Davis, 2006, p.  29), in many instances these people have no choice. As Davis documents, the role of the IMF in this process is crucial to see. Its policies, ones expressly supported by the United States, have constantly created these conditions and made them considerably worse over time (Davis, 2006, pp. 66–69). If all of this is so visible to Davis and many other committed people, why do the realities and very real complexities in this situation seem to be so readily ignored by governments, international agencies, and as Davis also demonstrates, a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)? Part of the explanation is that many Third World cities (and diasporic and poor populations of cities in the First World as well) exist in something like an epistemological fog, one that is sometimes willfully opaque. Most governments—and unfortunately not a few teachers in our urban areas and the teacher educators who teach them—know least about the slums, about the housing in them, about the services that their inhabitants need and (almost always) don’t get, and so on. The lack of knowledge here provides an epistemological veil (Davis, 2006, p. 42). What goes on under the veil is a secret that must be kept from “public view.” To know is to be subject to demands.3 It is important not to give the impression that the utter degradation that is being visited upon millions of people like the ones both Davis and I have pointed to has led only to a politics of simple acceptance. Indeed, as I argued earlier, one of the major elements we need to better understand is the agency of oppressed people inside and

266   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education outside of education. This is a crucial step in our rejecting the stereotypes that often go with an almost missionary sense that pervades teachers’ perspectives on global immigrants: “They are passive, less intelligent, and need to be saved.” While Davis’s book is not a conscious response to Spivak’s well-­known question, “Can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak, 1988), it does provide a number of insights into where and how we should look to recognize the agency that does exist. Such agency may be partial and even contradictory, but it is nearly always present (see Pedroni, 2007). As Davis (2006) shows in his own accounts, the “informal proletariat” of these slums is decidedly not passive: Even within a single city, slum populations can support a bewildering variety of responses to structural neglect and deprivation, ranging from charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neoliberal NGOs, and revolutionary social movements. But if there is no monolithic subject or unilateral trend in the global slum, there are nonetheless myriad acts of resistance. Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism. (p. 202) Davis’s discussion of the ways in which resistance operates and its organizations and forms is thoughtful. It helps us think through the manifold and sometimes contradictory voices and identities taken up by subaltern groups (Apple & Buras, 2006). Just as crucially, it documents how creative poor people are. This makes me stop and wonder whether many current and future teachers and many teacher educators actually recognize how powerfully resilient and creative the parents and communities of their diasporic students actually are. Only if these characteristics are recognized can we engage in a politics of recognition and respect and see global diasporic people as resources of hope in our schools and communities. They have already demonstrated through their lives how much they are willing to sacrifice and constantly struggle to assist their children in having a better life. Why do so many educators here in the United States look at them as if they were uncommitted to education and simply knowable by their economic circumstances now? Perhaps by thinking of words such as “housing” and “food” as verbs, as requiring constant labor and constant strategic and intelligent action, we might give “the others” the respect they have earned. Planet of Slums provides us with a deeply honest account of the realities and complex struggles in which diasporic people engage. We cannot, however, ignore education’s role in challenging such immiseration. Indeed, as the aforementioned example of Porto Alegre in Brazil so clearly shows, when deeply connected to a larger project of critical social transformation, educational transformations in schools, in the relationship between schools and communities, and in teacher education can and do take on crucial roles in altering the relationship between the state and local communities, in radically challenging the unequal distribution of services, in helping to create new activist identities for slum dwellers and for the teachers of their children, and in using local resources to build new and very creative forms of oppositional literacy (Apple, 2010a; Apple et al., 2003; Apple & Buras, 2006; Fisher, 2009). Combining Davis’s

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   267 t­ horoughly unromantic picture of the conditions, struggles, and creative resilience of the poor with a recognition of the ways in which schools such as those in Porto Alegre can often serve as arenas for building toward larger social transformations (see Apple et al., 2003, 2009, 2010; Apple & Buras, 2006)—and how teacher education programs can participate in assisting in these transformations—can provide us with some of the tools we need to go forward.

Inside the Global North My discussion in the previous part of this article has largely been on the Third World and the “Global South.” But even given the immensity of the problems that are occurring in the slums to which Davis bears such eloquent witness, we also need to focus a good deal of our attention on what is (perhaps too arrogantly) called the “First World.” We need to do this for a number of reasons. First, there is ever-­growing immiseration within this part of society, stimulated by exploitative economic conditions and international divisions of labor and the border-­crossing populations that accompany this, by the move toward what has been called “knowledge economies” and new definitions of what are “required skills”4 and of who does and does not have them (Apple, 2010a; Lauder, Brown, Dillabough, & Halsey, 2006), by the severe economic crisis so many nations are experiencing, and by the fact that in essence “the Empire has come home” (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982). Second, as I mentioned earlier, we need to think relationally. There are extremely important connections between crises in the “center” and those on the “periphery.” Of course, even using such words to describe these regions is to reproduce a form of the “imperial gaze” (e.g., Bhabha, 1994; Said, 1993). Yet, not to focus on what is too easily called the center can lead us to forget something else. Not only do economic, political, and ideological crises in those nations “at the center” have disastrous consequences in other nations, but the more privileged lives of many people in these more advantaged nations also require that other people living there pay the costs in the physical and emotional labor that is so necessary to maintain that advantage. As Pauline Lipman (2004) has clearly demonstrated in her discussion of educational reforms in Chicago, the advantages of the affluent in global cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so many others) depend on the availability of low-­paid—and gendered and raced—“others” who are “willing” to do the labor that underpins the affluent lifestyles of those higher up on the economic ladder. No analysis of the realities of schooling in cities in the United States or of the relations between cities, suburbs, and rural areas in the United States can be complete without an understanding of how schooling is implicated in these relations. And no significant changes in preparing teachers to teach in these areas can be successful if these realities are not given due attention. This is the case not only in our urban areas. Throughout the rural regions and small towns of the United States, large numbers of Latino/as are working on farms, in meatpacking plants, and in similar occupations. Their labor (often in deeply exploitative conditions) also underpins the “American lifestyle.” This says something important about what teachers and teacher educators often assume about globalization. It is seen as a “problem” of cities. This is decidedly not the case. Just as the growth of the U.S.

268   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education economy depended originally on slavery, on the unpaid domestic labor of women in homes and on farms, on the removal of native populations from the land, on a large number of workers from all over the world, so too do we now massively benefit from the often unseen labor of these urban and rural workers today. Thus, once again, rather than seeing poor diasporic students and their parents and communities as problems to be “fixed,” we must first start out by acknowledging our debt to them. Their labor underpins our relative affluence. Like all educators, teacher educators themselves need more adequate pictures, and theories that give these pictures meaning, that provide more powerful critical insights and descriptions of what all this means for our work. Having future and current teachers come to grips with a critical analysis that places the schools into urban and rural political economies, that demonstrates how the lives of so many more middle-­class and affluent urban and suburban dwellers are fully dependent on low-­paid and often disrespected immigrant labor, is crucial if teachers and their educators are to recognize the contributions of globalized workers both here in the United States and around the world. Critical intellectual resources—theoretical and historical—are essential tools here.

The Uses of “Powerful” Theory To understand this fully, I need to say more about the word theoretical in the previous paragraph and its place in critical work in education on issues surrounding globalization. In so doing, I want to ground the current section of this article in what may seem a somewhat odd, and partly autobiographical, way. When I was being trained as a teacher (I use the word trained consciously), I went to a small state teachers college at night. Nearly every course that I took had a specific suffix—“for teachers.” I took Philosophy for Teachers, World History for Teachers, Mathematics for Teachers, Physics for Teachers, and so on. The assumption seemed to be that since I had attended inner-­ city schools in a very poor community—a community that had a large immigrant population and had been rocked by economic decline caused by the mobility of capital and its factories as they moved to nations where labor was less organized and could be more completely exploited—and was going back to teach in those same inner-­city schools, I needed little more than a cursory understanding of the world around me, of the disciplines of knowledge, and of the theories that stood behind them. Theory was for those who were above people such as me. As long as I had some grounding in various practical teaching methods, I would survive. There were elements of good sense in this. After all, when I had been taught particular kinds of theory both at that small state teachers college and even at times later on in my graduate studies, it was all too often totally disconnected from the realities of impoverishment, racism, class dynamics, gendered realities, decaying communities and schools, cultural struggles, global forces, diasporic peoples, and the lives of teachers and community members. It too often also was disconnected from critically democratic educational practices. The realities of teaching, curriculum, and assessment in constantly changing urban and rural schools were in essence seen as forms of “pollution” that would somehow dirty our search for pure theory. But the elements of bad sense, of being intellectually marginalized because of my class background, and of being positioned as a “less than” were palpable. For me and

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   269 many others who grew up poor in that largely immigrant community and who wanted to understand more fully both our own experiences and why schooling, the economy, and indeed the world itself looked the way they did, the search for adequate explanations became crucial. Learning and using powerful theory, especially powerful critical theories, in essence, became a counterhegemonic act. Getting better at such theories, employing them to comprehend more fully the ways in which differential power actually worked, using them to see where alternatives could be and are being built in daily life, and ultimately doing all this in what we hoped were nonelitist ways gave us two things. First, all of this made the realities and complexities of dominance both sensible and at times depressing. But, second, it also provided a sense of freedom and possibility, especially when it was connected to the political and educational actions in which many of us were also engaged. These same experiences could be spoken of by members of many other groups who have been marginalized by race, by sex/gender, by class, by colonialism, and by an entire array of other forms of differential power. I say all this here because these memories remind me of some of the reasons why critical theoretical, historical, political, and empirical resources are so essential to creating a richer and more detailed understanding of the society in which we live and the role of education and teacher education in it. New and more honest political and ethical perspectives provide resources for building and defending more politically and ethically wise responses in policies, schools, classrooms, and teacher education programs—if once again these theories are also connected to specific movements and actions and to the major transformations that are occurring in our schools and communities.

First Principles But how are these theoretical, historical, political, and empirical resources to be mobil­ ized? There are some key principles that are significant in this regard. Over the past four decades, I and many others have argued that education must be seen as a political act. As I stated earlier in this article, we need to think relationally. That is, understanding education requires that we situate it back both into the unequal relations of power in the larger society and into the realities of dominance and subordination—and the conflicts—that are generated by these relations. Take the issues surrounding the curriculum, for example. Rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our all-­too-common tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? In our increasingly globalized world, what is the relationship between this knowledge and the ways in which it is taught and evaluated, and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society and others? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and from the ways schooling and this society are organized, and who does not? How do what are usually seen as “reforms” actually work? What can we do as critical educators, researchers, and activists to change existing educational and social inequalities and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just (Apple, 1995, 1996, 2000; Apple et al., 2003; Apple & Beane, 2007; Au, 2009; Buras, 2008; Gutstein, 2006; Lipman, 2004; North, 2009; Valenzuela, 2005)?

270   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education As I also stated, answering these questions requires that we engage in the process of repositioning. That is, we need to see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against the ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions. Engagement with this process has led to a fundamental restructuring of what the roles of research, researcher, teacher, and teacher educator are (Apple et al., 2009; Smith 1999; Weis & Fine, 2004). This role has been defined in many ways, but perhaps the best descriptions center on what the Italian political activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971) called the organic intellectual and the cultural and political historian Russell Jacoby (2000) termed the public intellectual (see also Burawoy, 2005). The restructured role of the researcher and teacher educator—one who sees her or his task as thinking as rigorously and critically as possible about the relations between the policies and practices that are taken for granted in education and the larger sets of dominant national and international economic, political, and cultural relations, and then connects this to action with and by social movements—is crucial to the task of a more invigorated and critical teacher education. In order to understand this more fully, I need to say more about the specific tasks of the critical scholar/activist in education. Although some of these arguments are developed in more detail elsewhere (Apple, 2010a; Apple et al., 2009), detailing the complexities of this role will enable us to see more clearly what we need to do in the context of growing global inequalities and can push us toward an enlarged sense of our intellectual and political responsibilities as teacher educators.

The Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist in Education In general, there are nine tasks in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education and teacher education must engage. 1. It must “bear witness to negativity.”5 That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination—and to struggles against such relations—in the larger society.6 For all educators and especially the educators of our current and future teachers, this requires a firmer foundation in global realities, in the ways in which our actions are affected by and strongly affect other nations and regions, and in the debts we owe. 2. In engaging in such critical analyses, it also must point to contradictions and to spaces of possible action. Thus, its aim is to examine critically current realities with a conceptual/political framework that emphasizes the spaces in which more progressive and counterhegemonic actions can, or do, go on. This is an absolutely crucial step, since otherwise our research can simply lead to cynicism or despair. In this regard, as we document the dangers of the powerful attacks on critically democratic educational policies and practices in schools and in teacher education programs, we also should do so with an eye to where we can make gains at the same time (see, e.g., Cochran-­Smith, Barnatt, Shakman, & Terrell, 2009; Cochran-­ Smith, Feiman-­Nemser, & McIntyre, 2008; McDonald, 2005; McDonald & Zeichner, 2009; Zeichner, 2009).

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   271 3. At times, this also requires a broadening of what counts as “research.” Here I mean acting as critical “secretaries” to those groups of people, social movements, and teacher educators who are now engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal power or in what elsewhere has been called nonreformist reforms, a term that has a long history in critical sociology and critical educational studies (Apple, 1995) and one that might also productively find its way into the thoughtful discussions in teacher education. This is exactly the task that was taken on in the thick descriptions of critically democratic school practices in Democratic Schools (Apple & Beane, 2007) and in the critically supportive descriptions of the transformative reforms such as the Citizen School and participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Apple et al., 2003; Gandin, 2006). Thus, we need to redouble our efforts at compelling descriptions of existing critically democratic teacher education programs and of their effects in creating deeply committed and successful teachers of all students (Cochran-­Smith et al., 2008; McDonald, 2005; Zeichner, 2009). 4. When the noted Italian political theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci (1971) argued that one of the tasks of a truly counterhegemonic education was not to throw out “elite knowledge” but to reconstruct its form and content so that it served genuinely progressive social needs, he provided a key to another role that “organic” and “public” intellectuals might play. Thus, we should not be engaged in a process of what might be called intellectual suicide. That is, there are serious intellectual (and pedagogic) skills in dealing with the histories and debates surrounding the epistemological, political, and educational issues involved in justifying what counts as important knowledge and what counts as an effective and socially just education in general and in teacher education programs in particular to prepare teachers to engage in such an education. These are not simple and inconsequential issues, and the practical and intellectual/political skills of dealing with them have been well developed. However, they can atrophy if they are not used. We can give back these skills by employing them to assist communities in thinking about this, learning from them, and engaging in the mutually pedagogic dialogues that enable decisions to be made in terms of both the short-­term and long-­term interests of dispossessed peoples (Borg & Mayo, 2007; Burawoy, 2005; Freire, 1970). 5. In the process, critical work has the task of keeping traditions of radical and progressive work alive. In the face of organized attacks on the “collective memories” of difference and critical social movements, attacks that make it increasingly difficult to retain academic and social legitimacy for multiple critical approaches that have proved so valuable in countering dominant narratives and relations, it is absolutely crucial that these traditions be kept alive, renewed, and when necessary criticized for their conceptual, empirical, historical, and political silences or limitations. This involves being cautious of reductionism and essentialism and asks us to pay attention to what, following Fraser (1997), I have called both the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition (see also Anyon et al., 2009). This includes not only keeping theoretical, empirical, historical, and political traditions alive but, very importantly, extending and (supportively) criticizing them. And it also involves keeping alive the dreams, utopian visions, and nonreformist reforms that are so much a part of these critical traditions in education and in teacher education (Apple, 1995; Jacoby, 2005; Teitelbaum, 1993).

272   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education 6. Keeping such traditions alive and also supportively criticizing them when they are not adequate to deal with current realities cannot be done unless we ask, “For whom are we keeping them alive?” and “How and in what form are they to be made available?” All of the things I have mentioned above in this taxonomy of tasks require the relearning or development and use of varied or new skills of working at many levels with multiple groups. Thus, journalistic and media skills, academic and popular skills, and the ability to speak to very different audiences are increasingly crucial (Apple, 2006). The popularity of neoliberal and neoconservative criticisms of teacher education programs and of schools of education themselves and the Right’s ability to circulate these criticisms widely point to the importance of our finding ways of interrupting these arguments and of showing their weaknesses. This requires us to learn how to speak in different registers and to say important things in ways that do not require that the audience or reader do all of the work. Of crucial import right now is the ability to expand the spaces of articulate uses of the media so that different ideas about the power of critically democratic teacher education programs circulate widely (e.g., Boler, 2008). 7. Critical educators must also act in concert with the progressive social movements their work supports or in movements against the rightist assumptions and policies they critically analyze. This is another reason that scholarship in critical education implies becoming an “organic” or “public” intellectual. One must participate in and give one’s expertise to movements engaged in actions to transform both a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. It also implies learning from these social movements (Anyon, 2005) and listening carefully to the needs and accumulated wisdom of diasporic people. This means that the role of the “unattached intelligentsia” (Mannheim, 1936), someone who “lives on the balcony” (Bakhtin, 1968), is not an appropriate model. As Bourdieu (2003) reminds us, for example, our intellectual efforts are crucial, but they “cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of the world is at stake” (p. 11). 8. Building on the points made in the previous paragraph, the critical scholar/activist in teacher education and in other areas of education has another role to play. She or he needs to act as a deeply committed mentor, as someone who demonstrates through her or his life what it means to be both an excellent researcher and teacher and a committed member of a society that is scarred by persistent inequalities. She or he needs to show how one can blend these two roles together in ways that may be tense but still embody the dual commitments to exceptional and socially committed research and participating in movements whose aim is interrupting dominance. It should go without saying that she or he needs to embody all of these commitments in her or his teaching. If we do not embody these global understandings and social/educational commitments in our own classes, how can we expect that our students—our current and future teachers—will do this in their own settings (Cochran-­Smith et al., 2008; Zeichner, 2009)? 9. Finally, participation also means using the privilege one has as a scholar/teacher/ activist. That is, each of us needs to make use of our privilege to open the spaces at universities and elsewhere for those who are not there, for those who do not now have a voice in that space and in the “professional” sites to which, being in a

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   273 ­ rivileged position, we have access. This can be seen, for example, in the history of p the activist-­in-residence program at the University of Wisconsin Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change, where committed activists in various areas (the environment, indigenous rights, housing, labor, racial disparities, education, and so on) were brought in to teach and to connect our academic work with organized action against dominant relations. Or it can be seen in a number of women’s studies programs and indigenous, aboriginal, and first nation studies programs that historically have involved activists in these communities as active participants in the governance and educational programs of these areas at universities. What roles might community activists from diasporic and global rights groups play in our teacher education programs and in challenging the ways in which we think about and interact with their children, their schools, and their communities? The list is not meant to be a final one. But it suggests a range of responsibilities, many of which of are currently being taken very seriously in some of our teacher education programs (Cochran-­Smith et al., 2008; McDonald, 2005; McDonald & Zeichner, 2009; Zeichner, 2009). Of course, no one person can do all of these things simultaneously. These are collective responsibilities, ones that demand a cooperative response. But these varied tasks should constantly be on the minds of all of us who are dedicated to building teacher education programs that deal powerfully with the global realities our current and future teachers will increasingly face.

Some Final Thoughts In taking these tasks as seriously as they deserve, we can be grounded in something that Ricardo Rosa (2008) has articulated: “For new structures to come into being and new political engagements to be nurtured, it is necessary that we have a language to bring it into existence—a lexicon of change, so to speak” (p. 3). One of these languages of course is the language of globalization. But this language can both open and close at the same time. It can provide us with powerful resources of understanding and of possible educational actions, but only if it is connected to a rich and detailed sensitivity to complexity, to politics, to cultural struggles both here and abroad, to an enhanced sense of agency and respect for those whom this society all too often sees as “the other,” and finally to a recognition of the debts we must repay to those who labor so hard for our benefit. The language of globalization speaks to the constant struggles both to understand more fully the global and local forces of dominance and to keep them from preventing or destroying an education worthy of its name. These struggles for what I have elsewhere called thick democracy occur both inside and outside of schools, colleges, and universities (Apple, 2006). They signify the continuation of what Raymond Williams (1961) so felicitously called “the long revolution,” the ongoing movements in so many nations to create a vision of critical democracy and critical teaching that responds to the best in us. A key here is what I mentioned in my taxonomy of tasks in this article: nonreformist reforms. Reforms such as building and defending schools and teacher education

274   Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education ­ rograms that are grounded in more global realities, that can be jointly controlled by p all of the people involved, and that may partly interrupt dominance are crucial. But of the many reforms that are needed, we should engage in those that we predict will more clearly lead to expanding the space of further interruptions. Reforming teacher education programs and institutions must be done with an eye toward their role in expanding the space of even more critically democratic reforms (Zeichner, 2009). The ongoing relations among education and dominance/subordination and the struggles against these relations are exactly that, the subject of struggles. The constant attempts by real people in real movements in real economic, political, and ideological conditions to challenge their circumstances—and the ensuing actions by dominant groups to regain their hegemonic leadership and their control of this terrain—make any statement about a final conclusion meaningless. What we can do is to help ensure that these movements and counterhegemonic activities in teacher education and in the schools and communities such programs ultimately serve are made public and that we honestly ask ourselves what our roles are in supporting the struggles toward the long revolution. What I personally can hope for is that the critical theoretical, educational, and political resources I have suggested here can help us “bear witness”; illuminate spaces for critical work; keep alive the multiple critical traditions in teacher education and the larger field of education; and act as secretaries for the tendencies, movements, and people who demand something better for themselves, their children, their schools, and their teachers in a world filled with both pain and possibility. The first step is having a firmer understanding of globalization and its effects. But let us then take the many steps that follow.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Corresponding Author Michael W. Apple, University of Wisconsin, Department of Educational Curriculum and Instruction, 225 North Mills Street, Madison, WI 53706 Email: apple@education. wisc.edu

Notes 1. A shorter version of the arguments advanced in this article can be found in Apple (2010a). 2. Such relational understanding is also based in a recognition of the importance of Bourdieu’s (1999) comment that “intellectual life, like all other social spaces, is a home of nationalism and imperialism” (p. 220).

Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education   275 3. Thus, here the very lack of Foucault’s panopticon (Foucault, 1977) constitutes a form of control. This is a political and conceptual intervention that is not overtly made by Davis, but it is a significant one. I hope that it causes some of those within the postmodern educational research community within teacher education and the general research community who are uncritically wedded to Foucault as a theorist of new forms of control to raise questions about whether the absence of knowledge and the absence of the panopticon may be equally as important when we are talking about massive structural global inequalities such as those being discussed here. 4. The concept of “skill” is not neutral. It is an ideological and political concept. For example, the work that women and minoritized people have historically done has had a much harder time being labeled as skilled labor. 5. I am aware that the idea of “bearing witness” has religious connotations, ones that are powerful in the West, but may be seen as a form of religious imperialism in other religious traditions. I still prefer to use it because of its powerful resonances with ethical discourses. But I welcome suggestions from, say, Muslim critical educators and researchers for alternative concepts that can call forth similar responses. I want to thank Amy Stambach for this point. 6. Here, exploitation and domination are technical not rhetorical terms. As I noted, the first refers to economic relations, the structures of inequality, the control of labor, and the distribution of resources in a society. The second refers to the processes of representation and respect and to the ways in which people have identities imposed on them. These are analytic categories, of course, and are ideal types. Most oppressive conditions are partly a combination of the two. These map on to what Fraser (1997) calls the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition.

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About the Author

Michael W. Apple is John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his recent books are The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education (2009) and Global Crises, Social Justice, and Education (2010).

Index

accountability 9, 24, 52, 103, 113n26, 213, 215, 220, 229; experts 208; lack of 246; mechanisms 72, 202; public 230; systems 122; teacher 227 accumulation 27, 93, 104, 114, 132; capital 70, 72, 80, 82, 95, 101, 103, 113n33, 140, 143, 145–6, 155; corporate 135; crisis 92, 116, 147 administrators 12, 51, 59–60, 69, 76, 102, 113n26, 160, 170, 176, 198, 219, 230, 233; conservative 120; male 127, 131n43 Africa 12, 195, 222, 261; African descent 230 Althusser, L. 7–8, 38n8, 80, 151n57; postAlthusserian writers 85 Amenta, E. and Young, M.P. 245 analytic philosophy 2, 6 anti-racist 2, 13–14 Anyon, J. 151n56, 263, 271–2 Arnot, M. 5, 88n11, 238n58 Asia 12–13, 186–7, 189–90, 193, 194n2, 195, 221–2, 258, 264; Asian students 238n51 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) 11–12, 233 Au, W. 261, 269 authoritarian populist 199, 201, 241, 243, 254; religious movements 9–­10, 13, 213, 242, 250 autonomous 33, 81, 84; connections 223; dynamic 8, 72; forms of knowledge 151n57; human nature 217; institutions 219; interests 162; nature of teaching 97; practices 145; semi-autonomous employees 116, 127; sphere of action 139; visible pedagogy 206 autonomy 81, 116, 118, 120, 164, 195, 205, 219; abstracted 206; individual 105; relative 83, 97, 113n39, 147, 163; school 223, 101; worker 139 Bernstein, B. 5–6, 19, 24, 31, 70, 79–80, 88n10, 114n45, 153, 205–6, 227, 251 Bhabha, H. 192, 211n49, 267

black 76, 139, 192, 203; children 14; communities 2; students 52, 230; women 255n4; workers 148; youth 87 Bourdieu, P. 6, 24, 26, 52, 64, 70, 79–80, 153, 155, 195, 218, 221, 223, 272, 274n2 Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. 5, 20–1, 30, 33, 70, 76–7, 83, 88n18, 133 Brasher, B. 247–8, 254 Brazil 12–­13, 261, 266, 271 Britain 8, 93–4, 170, 174, 180, 197, 200, 206, 211n49; Great Debate and the Green Paper 93, 101, 112n6, 114n39; see also British, England British 8, 207; Empire 259; investors 187; Journal of Sociology of Education 74l primary schools 53; publishers 174; sociologists 23, 54; Union of Fascists 248; works 156 brown people 87, 192 Buras, K.L. 13, 262, 266–7, 269 Burawoy, M. 129n3, 136, 145, 149n6, 270–1 Burbules, N. 236n17, 259 capitalism 113n32, 189, 191, 247; advanced 109, 244; class relations 86; contemporary 76; economic practices 103; global 266; liberal phase 124; market relations 152; patriarchal 190 capitalist 93, 146; capitalistic logic school 151n57; economics 171; environment 255; government 13; market 173; production 83, 97, 143; relations 8, 146; social relations 111; societies 71, 83 Carnoy, M. 30, 88n19, 164 Castells, M. 70–1, 110, 143, 150n38, 242 censorship 160, 162, 170; absence 12, 233 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 7, 267 children 2, 12, 15, 30, 42, 45, 49, 51–2, 54–9, 62–3, 70, 78, 92, 98–9, 101, 125–6, 141, 170, 174–5, 187–91, 194n2, 200–2, 209, 214, 216,

Index   281 218, 220, 230–1, 241–52, 254, 258, 260, 266, 273–4; Afro-Caribbean 221; diasporic 260; poor 207, 233 China 13, 174, 259 Citizen School and participatory budgeting 14, 271 Clarke, J., Critcher, C. and Johnson, R. 78, 88n5, 103, 112n11 class 3, 8, 19, 25, 30, 268; antagonisms 9; dynamics 73, 88n11; gender and race 16, 152–3, 174; relations 47, 74, 79, 82–6, 133, 171, 179, 188–9, 222 Cochran-Smith, M. 270–3 collective 108, 111, 218, 222; action 36, 45, 49, 137, 143–5; commitment 26, 63, 136, 141–2, 222; culture 29, 81; memory 15, 271; responses 223, 233 colonial 189–90; colonialism 3, 184n23, 193n2, 194, 263, 269; countries 174; heritage 178; history 260; reality 262 communities 12, 70, 108, 170, 212, 233, 242, 258, 260, 271, 274; Asian 221; Black and Latino 2; cultural 203; decaying 3, 268; diasporic 266, 268; educational 11, 84, 236n17, 275n3; local 78, 229, 234, 266; oppressed 15, 263; privileged 222 community 4, 50, 122, 226, 249, 254–5; action 151n52, 261; activists 9, 199, 240n102, 273; business 244; destruction 10, 207, 209; imagined 222, 238n57; immigrant 269; institutions 53, 233; life 253; members 3, 11, 171, 219, 263; participation 2, 7; poor 3, 14, 268; sense of 25–6; values 104 Connell, R.W. 131n41, 131n45 conservative 1, 7, 9–11, 37, 67n44, 67n57, 170–1, 177, 183, 199–200, 215, 228, 232–3, 235, 237n26, 241, 242–50, 252–3; administrators 120; Christians 255n6; coalition 202; context 234; cultural 175; educational positions 213; evangelicals 255n7; gains 205; groups 162, 172; home schoolers 251, 254, 255n6; material 182; modernization 212, 216, 222, 225, 229; organizations 255n2; movements 174; practices 57; principled 207; religious movement 16; restoration 168, 180, 192, 194n3, 196, 208, 214; rural areas 14; society 201; stance 58; think tanks 259; triumphalism 197; unions 150n36 counter-hegemonic action 3, 6; curricula 9; movements 16; struggle 241 Counts, G.S. 15 critical analysis 5–7, 9, 12–­13, 30, 33, 36, 47–8, 177, 262, 264, 270 critical education 8, 235, 258, 260, 272;

literature 258; policies 214; positions 12, 234; practices 232; studies 271; theory 3, 6, 11, 14, 46–8, 79; traditions 233; writings 236n17 critical educators 5, 11–13, 233, 269, 272, 275n5 cultural 7; control 20, 22, 43, 51, 64, 71, 80, 164, 174; institutions 9, 27, 30–1, 54, 97, 244; production 83, 107, 114n60, 152; reproduction 6, 25, 32, 64, 74, 79, 151n57, 153; resources 22; struggles 3, 5, 10, 220, 235, 262, 268, 273; traditions 204, 260–1 cultural capital 20, 25–8, 41, 43, 46, 51, 64, 70, 75, 78, 93, 104, 132, 163, 165n5, 196, 218–19, 223–4, 231; of dominant classes 38, 63, 80, 151n57, 153; dynamics of 162, 167n52; group 171 curriculum 1–2, 5, 7, 9–10, 12, 15, 19, 24–5, 27, 37, 102, 113n37, 116, 119, 121–2, 124, 153–4, 162, 164, 169, 177, 196–7, 202–3, 269; academic 56, 232; antiracist 204; common 16, 203–4, 208; content 70; national curriculum 161, 196–8, 201–7, 209, 211n64, 214, 219, 224–8, 232 prescribed 220, 229, 231–2; religious 250, studies 4­6, 80 curricular 98–100, 118–19, 123; activity 146–7; analysis 36; apparatus 80, 97; arrangements 83, 94; benchmarks 205; content 6, 95, 219; control 128; framework 125; goals 124, 197; knowledge 29, 31, 37–8, 79, 81, 111; material 108–9, 114n60, 148, 154, 251; policy 32; practice 26, 69, 101, 113n26, 205, 261; program 71, 126; reform 76; research 61–2; skills 33; systems 102–4 Dale, R. 5, 8–9, 66n17, 73, 120, 129n11, 129n16, 164, 200, 216, 259, 264 Davis, M. 13, 264–7, 275n3 debate 5, 7–8, 28, 39n23, 74, 77, 82, 84, 87, 147, 151n57, 161, 163, 171, 174, 177, 199, 215, 232, 236n17, 241, 271; academic 146; curriculum 213; in England 204; international 13; national 180; political 9, 24, 72; public 200–1, 207, 225 depoliticization 23–4, 31, 62, 80, 145, 216, 233, 240n102 deskilling 6, 16, 86, 95–6, 99, 104, 106, 109, 113n26, 116, 118, 121, 127, 128n3, 135–6, 139–40, 176, 195, 206; intellectual 122; and reskilling 6, 97, 100, 106, 109–10, 121, 125, 128 deterministic 21, 33, 47; models 126, 135; theories 148, 151n57 Dewey, J. 48, 176, 207

282   Index diasporic 260–1; populations 16, 258, 262, 265, 272–3; students 266, 268 disenfranchised 171, 177, 201, 208 diversity 43, 204; political 45; in schooling 206, 220, 243 dominance 3, 5–7, 13, 16, 25, 52, 59, 61, 63, 65n8, 85, 134, 177–9, 195, 269, 272–4; academic 118; class 192; conservative Christian 243; dominant groups 10, 20, 38, 70, 72, 183, 187, 191, 200, 208, 232, 255n4; male 117–18, 124; structures of 264 du Toit, M. 249 Durkheim, D.E. 34, 153

ideology 30, 84; labor process 88n5; nonEuropean 190–1 evaluation 4, 7, 10, 15, 19, 25, 35–7, 43, 46, 59–61, 63–4, 69, 81, 96, 99, 101, 123, 169, 195–7, 202, 206, 212, 219, 226, 229, 232–3, 269; aspects 113n26; educational 67n44; framework 125; ideology 34, 174; mechanisms 52, 98, 100; social 75; systems 170; policies 205 exploitation 5, 7–8, 73, 79, 81, 85, 127, 137, 143, 153, 168, 175–6, 188, 193, 264, 268, 270, 275n6; exploitative conditions 192, 218, 249, 267

Eagleton, T. 66n23, 108, 165n4 economic conditions 21, 50, 73, 111, 156–7, 263, 267; control 46, 164, 174; institutions 20, 27, 41, 44, 49, 72; manipulation 20, 55; and political 20, 23, 28, 31, 41, 52, 54, 69, 134, 163, 165n7, 173; power 23, 31, 72, 165n7, 222; structure 19, 21­–2 Education and Power 6, 15, 129n4, 165n5 education 5­6, 83; role of 5, 20, 28, 79, 178, 269 educational institutions 19–20, 22–3, 29–30, 33, 47, 50, 53–4, 58, 72, 81, 87, 89, 95, 101, 133, 153, 155n5 188, 223, 234 educational policy 7, 11, 33, 73, 88n16, 93, 199–200, 212, 215, 232, 234–5, 241, 259–60, 270; critical 214; democratic 261, 270; liberal 5, 32; racialization 9, 218 educational transformations 7, 186, 266 educators 7, 11, 15, 19–20, 24, 26–7, 29, 31, 34–8, 42–5, 47–9, 53–4, 56– 8, 60–2, 64, 81, 116, 120, 163, 189, 202, 213, 231–2, 235, 243, 245, 258, 261, 264; activist 13, 186–7, 263; critical 5, 11–13, 233–4, 269, 272, 275n5; democratic 135, 182; progressive 84, 148, 198, 215–16; teacher 260, 265–8, 270–1 Edwards, R. 88n5, 113n27, 129n12, 138, 149n18 elementary school 78, 98, 105, 108, 130n36, 195; material 119; principalship 117; teachers 78, 86, 125, 127, 130n36, 176 elite 174, 194n2; business 187; conceptions 195; cosmopolitan 183; culture 31, 152, 155, 195; groups 80, 187, 195; history 24; knowledge 271; students and schools 226 elitist 180, 235; heritage 178; ideologies 205 emancipation 14, 48–9, 82, 147, 178, 193, 233 England 5–6, 31, 79, 83, 111, 119, 125, 130n36, 153, 156, 197, 204, 211n64, 214, 216, 219–22, 225–9, 231 equality 27, 30; of opportunity 39n23, 221 Europe 13, 47, 79, 95, 111, 154, 157, 190; critical theory 6; European writers 156;

Feinberg, W. 29, 32, 39n23, 66n28 Fiske, J. 168–9, 190, 192 Foucault, M. 188, 203, 275n3 France 6, 79, 153; philosophical thought 47 Fraser, N. 8, 188, 238n46, 247, 262, 271, 275n6 freedom 121, 182–3, 206, 217, 222; economic 94, 200; market 215; personal 94; sense of freedom 3, 269 Freire, P. 13, 15, 181, 232, 240n102, 271; Freirean approach 233–4 free market 93, 199–200, 202, 207, 213, 224, 227 Gandin, L.A. 259, 261, 271 Geertz, C. 34 gender 3, 8, 77–9, 82, 86, 108, 116–18, 120–1, 126–7, 156, 163, 176, 234, 262; advantages 76; antagonisms 69; bias 174; biography 181; conflicts 164; divisions 230; dominance 192, 241; dynamics 124, 130n36, 222, 238n58; gendered labor 128, 164, 246, 267; gendered realities 3, 13, 247, 268; gendered state 220; hierarchy 197; ideologies 119, 131n41; inequalities 179, 205; inferiority 194n3; justice 213; marginalization 269; oppressions 87; politics 125, 195; relations 88n22, 97, 118, 200, 244, 263; resistance 125; roles 170; struggles 117, 125, 170; and teaching 127, 129n11; walls 248 Germany 153; German investors 187; German philosophy 47 Gillborn, D. 5, 215, 229–31, 238n51, 262 Giroux, H. 234, 236n17 globalization 9, 15–16, 258, 261–2, 264, 267–8, 273–4; intensification 242; neoliberal 260; processes 259 government 13, 71–2, 93, 113n37, 178, 183, 199, 227, 258, 265; approval 174; Conservative 237n26; control 261; experts 243; federal 102, 161; influences 246; legitimacy 73, 202; military-dominated 187–8; office 253; officials 228; policies 10,

Index   283 193, 259; responsibility 213; resources 245; rightist 180, 206; Thatcher 197 Gramsci, A. 4, 7,­10, 21–2, 26–7, 41, 80, 103, 110, 162, 192, 214, 234–5, 270–1 Grierson, P.C. 79, 83 Habermas, J. 3, 24, 68n69, 114n40, 234 Hall, S. 8, 71, 179 Hardisty, J. 255, 255n2 hegemonic 41, 43, 191, 260, 274; alliance 233; bloc 9–10, 207, 212; control 177; counterhegemonic 3, 6, 9, 16, 232, 234–5, 241, 248, 269–71; cultures 189; form 35; power 204; relations 84; schooling 248; structures 61, 163; teaching 37 hegemony 7, 22, 24, 27–8, 38, 42, 64, 110, 204; bloc 9–10; concept of 21, 28, 36; gender 82; ideological 23, 26, 37, 80–2, 86, 104, 106, 110, 150n46; structural 65 Herrnstein, R. and Murray, C. 194, 215 hidden curriculum 31, 44, 56, 63–5, 68n73, 76, 132, 134, 139, 145–8; differentiated 133, 136; literature 135, 141; in schools 29, 37, 81–2, 133, 136, 143 high school 16n1, 76, 158, 160, 251; minority girls 87; teachers 94, 240 Hirsch, E.D. 179, 204, 215–16 Hogan, D. 70, 73, 88n5 Huerta, L. 245–6 identity 7–8, 10, 55, 262; Christian 194n3, 244, 247, 252; national 201, 211n49; politics 245; social 204 ideological 8, 10, 16, 20, 23–4, 26, 29–30, 34–8, 41, 44–5, 48, 56–61, 64, 66n28, 69, 72–3, 80–2, 84–7, 99, 103–5, 107, 109, 135, 161–2, 174, 177, 180, 193, 204, 206, 222, 228, 232, 248; apparatus 54; attack 196; beliefs 243; blinders 33; choices 31;commitment 25, 199, 213, 227; concept 275; conditioning 46; conditions 55, 150n38, 212, 263, 274; configurations 43, 50; consensus 179; construction 249; context 242; controversies 173; crises 120, 128, 149n2, 267; dimension 42; domination 62, 163; dynamics 207, 259; elements 111, 164, 252; effects 220; ends 118; forms 32, 150n4;framework 66n33; functions 49; hegemony 65, 106, 110, 150n46; interests 254; labels 63; lines 225; message 94; position 255n7; practices 83, 108, 121, 134; pressures 95; process 270; relations 176; representation 88n12; rules 175; saturation 53; structure 251; tendencies 215; transformations 15, 97, 234; values 19

ideology 29–30; liberal 32, 44, 55; works 84–6 Ideology and Curriculum 5–6, 15, 114n40, 165n5 195, 208 immigrant 204, 266; community 269; parents 218; populations 222, 268 inequality 20, 117, 169, 206, 275n6; creation of 23, 30, 33; economic 37, 73; legitimation of 55, 135; relations of 182, 216; social 80 Institute for Constructive Capitalism 94 institutions 23, 45, 49–52, 54, 58, 62–3, 65, 71; bureaucratic 60, 69; cultural 9, 30–1, 97, 244; determined 84, 133–4; economic 20, 27, 41, 44, 72; major 64; social 48, 97, 133, 179, 249 intellectual 1, 9, 14, 23, 26, 37–8, 42, 48, 55–7, 59, 198; activities 29, 105; antiintellectualism 243, 252; character 168; civil war 172; connections 5, 13; consensus 43; conservatism 45; deskilling 122; difference 64; functions 47; guardians 182, 208; life 62, 274n2; marginalization 268; neoconservative 179, 199, 213;openness 4, 133; paradigm 44; public 15, 270–2; tradition 47, 258; work 28, 65, 80, 253 intensification 6, 16, 121–8, 130n21, 131n43, 219–20, 246 interconnections 29, 88n23; complex 87, 103; dialectical 79; international connections 5, 13 interpretation 21–2, 34, 54, 60, 70, 77, 161, 181, 198; activist 249; cultural 47, 66n23; divergent 243; economic 23; Marxist 47, 66n22; oppositional 182 Jacoby, R. 270–1 Japan 13, 174, 187, 197, 206 Jencks, C. 60, 76, 88n7 Johnson, R. 85, 88n5, 94, 104, 108, 110, 203–4 Karabel, J. and Halsey, A.H. 69, 78–9 Kelly, G. and Nihlen, A. 78, 129n10 Kerckhoff, A.C. 74, 77, 87n4 Kliebard, H. 4, 64, 213, 231 knowledge 5–7, 16; legitimate 23, 37, 55, 62, 64, 70, 153–4, 170–1, 173–4, 179, 181–2, 192; and power 4­7, 19, 31, 59, 73, 127; sociology 79 Korea 13, 174; legal teachers union 14 Koven, S. and Michel, S. 249 labor 6, 88n5, 95, 100, 110, 120, 122, 126, 128, 135, 138, 143, 145; of capital 92; control 129n3; immigrant 268; state employees 119; of teaching 9, 116–17, 121, 123 labor market 133, 168; dual 158; hierarchical 76, 135–6, 141; internal 163; racialized 261

284   Index Latin America 12–13, 95, 111, 258, 260–1 Lauder, H. and Hughes, D. 221, 238n52 leadership 9, 118, 205, 232, 253; administrative 60; hegemonic 274 legitimation 34–5, 70–2, 80, 82, 92–3, 103, 114n40, 116, 135, 177 Lipman, P. 229, 231, 239n92, 267, 269 literacy 2, 14, 168, 175, 250; critical 178, 183; oppositional 266; political 168–9; rates 156 manipulation 22, 62, 64; economic 20–1, 41, 55; political 41; of schooling 21 Mannheim, K. 28, 272 marginalized 3, 236n17, 259, 268–9 marketization 200, 205, 207, 214–16, 221, 224–5, 232 Marx, K. 3, 9, 29, 66n22, 152–3 Marxism 6, 8, 15, 30, 34, 47, 54, 74, 76, 79, 83, 107; critics 88n5; cultural analysts 95; ethnographers 106; research 88n11 McCarthy, C. and Critchlow, W. 189, 193, 211n52, 237n33 McClure, H.M. and Fischer, G. 34, 39n34 McDonald, M. 270–1, 273 middle class 80, 116, 130n36, 193, 228, 268; actor 224; areas 56; boys and girls 203; literate 157; managers 220, 231; new 9–10, 162, 213, 236; parents 218, 221; professional 219, 225; underachievers 230; women teachers 125–6 national testing 148, 196–9, 202, 205, 207, 214, 224–6, 228, 232 neo-Marxist 5, 7–8, 14, 38, 79, 212, 233; analysis 48; perspectives 54; scholarship 46 neoconservative 10, 200–2, 204, 221, 224–5, 231–2, 234–5; criticisms 272; impulses 259; intellectuals 9, 199, 213; policies 219–20, 222, 236, 237n26, 238n58 neoliberal 9–10, 200–1, 207, 216–17, 219–20, 222, 224, 232, 234–5, 259; criticisms 272; globalization 260; market 225, 227, 231; marketized solutions 213; neoliberalism 198, 205; policies 221, 236, 237n26, 238n58; pressures 4; reforms 218 neutrality 24–5, 32, 64, 82; economic 38 New Right 170, 182, 199, 203–4, 214, 221 Noble, D. 68n66 140 non-elitist 3, 148, 240n102, 269 nongovernmental organizations 265–6 Official Knowledge 7, 12, 195 official knowledge 16, 29, 81, 158, 171–2, 178, 180, 183, 189, 192, 195, 204, 207, 259; politics of 9, 174, 178, 183, 195–6, 199, 207

Olneck, M. 70, 76 openness 4, 55; lack of 45 oppressed 13, 15, 181, 207, 241, 263, 265 pedagogic 206; activity 69, 147, 252; campaign 7; commitment 3; differences 251; discourse 227; framework 125; life 94; skills 100, 271; substance 219; work 120 pedagogical 98, 113n26, 232, 234; apparatus 80, 100; belief 252; content 99; practices 68n73, 83, 101, 205; pedagogy 6, 81, 196, 198, 203–4, 220, 251; autonomous visible 206; critical 8, 11, 14–15, 215, 223, 227, 232–5 people of color 84, 117, 163, 170, 174, 199, 203–4, 210n21; children 207, 233; students 221–2 phenomenology 3, 15, 47; social 6, 53–5 political 8, 20, 163; activists 1, 233, 270; tradition 4, 47, 258, 271 political economy 6, 9, 46, 75–6, 78, 82, 152–3, 189, 191, 235, 262–3; of cultural production 114n60; of culture 152, 155; of education 30; of gendered labor 164; global 264; local 128; of publishing 109, 162 politics 2, 7–9, 13–14, 16, 17n2, 35–6, 70, 73, 164, 169, 175–6, 178, 181, 183, 195, 199, 205, 207, 225, 232, 234, 244, 260, 262–3, 266, 271–3, 275n6; of acceptance 265; containment 201; cultural 179, 182, 204; of education 217; identity 245; internal 69; emerging 71; gender 125, 200; of knowledge distribution 28, 47; of official knowledge 153, 196; of patriarchy 119; of race 223, 236; reactionary 194; of state adoption policies 162; of text 161, 172, 174; of whiteness 189 poor 2–3, 27, 188, 201, 205, 209, 264, 267, 269; children 51, 203, 207, 233; communities 14, 268; parents 218; rural region 186; students 221–2, 230; urban 265–6 postcolonial 193, 221, 233; community 212; history 211n49; postcolonialism 259; reality 262 postmodern 7, 189, 212, 223, 234; educational research 275n3 poststructural 7­8, 181, 212, 262 Poulantzas, N. 8, 88n5, 149n3 power 170, 182, 203; conflict 34­35; differential 3, 14, 78, 89, 175, 182, 187, 195, 203, 247, 259, 269; dynamics 6, 11, 193n2; economic and political 23, 31, 72, 165n7, 222; relations 7, 64, 70, 128, 168, 171, 183, 184n24, 190, 219 privatization 170, 196, 200, 202, 205–7, 222

Index   285 progressive 4, 12; educators 14, 84, 148, 198, 215–16; elements 106, 111, 162, 228; movements 14, 207; policies 232 publishers 154; American 156; basal 159–60; religious 244; text 155, 158– 9, 164, 233, 251 race 8, 61, 69, 71, 76–8, 82, 86, 118, 148, 164, 170, 179, 181, 194, 220, 261–2; anti-racist 2, 13–14, 204, 233; differences 70, 108, 205; gender and race 6, 8­9, 16, 152–3, 174, 200; racial 76, 243; actors 78; composition 200; dominance 192; dynamics 88n23, 189, 222; exclusion 223; groups 64; hierarchies 197; inequalities 205, 221, 273; inferiority 194; justice 213; marginalization 3, 269; meanings 79; oppression 87; progressive material 147; state 237n33; structures 19, 230, 263; subjugation 13; undercurrent 171, 205, 211n52, 238n57 racialization 9, 14, 218, 230, 261, 263; racism 3, 165n9, 184n29, 209, 268–9; racist 1, 10, 194n3, 195, 204, 230 radical 8, 14, 233; books 17n1; challenge 266; intellectual work 3; literacy 2; reform 223; teachers 235; traditions 9, 15, 232, 271; transformation 118, 191, 214–15, 219, 226, 246 reductive 5, 16, 71, 84, 116, 177, 201, 220; accountability 122, 229; testing 226–7, 231 relations of power 79, 182, 189, 192, 194n2; differential 213; patriarchal 118; shifting 214; unequal 5, 179, 196, 269 religious 10, 181, 241, 249; commitments 243; conservative 16, 242, 246–8; fundamentalists 213; movements 1, 13, 16; women 247–8 resistance 6, 78, 80, 82, 86, 92, 94, 96, 105, 107–8, 110, 121, 127–8, 140–2, 147–8, 149n18, 150n26, 150n38, 173, 175, 178, 203, 206, 231, 266; female workforce 120; gendered 125–6; labor 97; overt 106, 109; student 83; worker 137–9, 143–5 Rethinking Schools 11, 232–3, 240n102 right 9–11, 111, 168–70, 173, 181–2, 197, 199, 204, 207, 209, 234–5, 249, 255n2, 272; activism 255n6; coalition 201–2; government 180, 206; groups 247; movement 8, 16, 255; policies 14, 174, 272; reforms 215; regimes 71; resurgence 176; rightist 196, 198, 200, 205, 207, 212, 232; transformation 15; women 248 rights 43, 110, 244; democratic 176; discourse of 109; human 189, 262; indigenous 273; person 93, 130n34, 200; property 130n34, 224; student 4, 36; subsidiary 158

Robertson, S. 239n70, 264 Rushdie, S. 192, 259 Said, E. 184n29, 190–1, 267 scholar/activist 4; critical 11, 15, 262, 270–2 schooling 1–3, 7, 20–1, 28, 30, 32–3, 36–7, 51, 59, 73, 83, 85, 92, 109, 133, 170–2, 188, 214, 246, 248, 263, 269; conservative attacks on 215; cultural domination 82; destruction of 216; function of 56; home 16, 242–5, 250–5; institution of 24, 27, 45, 153; for the other 222; outcomes 113n31, 116; practices of 200, 241; process of 44, 61; quality 223; realities 169, 267; rejection of 87; reproductive nature 62; structure of 63; transforming 206, 212 Schooling in Capitalist America 5, 83, 133 schools 12, 47, 78, 117, 229, 268; black boxes 68n77, 76–7, 84, 105, 143, 150n36; charter 222, 243; democratic 11–12, 233–4, 271; elementary 98, 108, 130n36; inner city 1, 3, 16n1, 268; public 53, 162, 221, 231, 242–3; roles 25, 72–3; secondary 160, 164, 233, 250; teachers 86, 94, 125, 127, 130n36, 176, 240n102 Schutz, A. 3, 68n63 science 25–6, 32, 35, 37, 42, 55, 61, 68n69, 98, 102, 111, 119, 154, 156, 161, 197, 241, 250–1; curricula 113n25; feminist criticisms 209n11; history 6; mistrust 243; philosophers 133; science- based industries 71; social 45, 50, 162 secular humanism 199, 241 Sharp, R. and Green, A. 31, 53­55, 83 Slevin, J. 242 Smith, C. 243­244 social 7, 37–8, 56; amelioration 26, 32, 41, 44, 55, 73; control 20, 27, 33, 37, 43, 45, 50, 63, 65n8, 169, 200, 228; labeling 29, 81; power 19, 190, 213; transformation 5, 175, 266–7 social movement 8, 25, 34, 183, 204, 222, 235, 241, 244–5, 254, 270–1; authoritarian populist 199; Christian Right 248; conservative 1, 9; emancipatory 14; home schooling 242; progressive 272; revolutionary 266 social relations 21, 25, 37, 80–1, 83, 100, 106, 108, 133, 146, 152–3, 155, 159, 191–2, 203; capitalist 111; classroom 154; dominant 84; hierarchical 96; patriarchal 86; of power 169, 190; of production 9, 152 Society, Education and State Course Team 83 Spain 13; Spanish 52, 260–1 Stambach, A. 262, 275n5

286   Index status 57, 60, 129n11, 134, 144, 153, 172, 222–4, 228, 230, 250; attainment 73– 8, 88n5; foundational 206; inferior 50; neutral 45; occupational 74, 76; professional 124, 130n34, 225; scientific 56, 64; socioeconomic 200, 221; subaltern 241, 254; worker 142 Stevens, M. 242–4, 246, 250–3 Strasser, S. 131n43, 247, 255n3 strikes 121, 137, 140–1, 145, 211n64 structural understandings 7­8, 262 subordination 5, 7, 79–80, 192, 195, 269, 274; subordinate groups 177 Sweden 153, 222 systems management 24, 29, 41, 62, 81, 148 taken for granted 1, 41–2, 44, 46, 48–9, 51, 67n37, 83, 179, 270 Taylorism 92, 96, 111, 121, 135–7, 144–5 teacher education 4, 15, 198, 258, 261, 263, 266, 269; institutions 259; programs 260, 267, 269–74; research community 275n3 teachers 1, 93, 113n26, 117, 175, 183n7, 234; college 1, 3, 268; labor 6; male 131n43; radical 235; school 78, 86, 94, 117, 125, 127, 130n36, 176, 240n102; shortage 125; talented 217; union 1, 12, 14, 111, 176, 207; women 117–18, 120, 125, 127, 131n43 199 Teachers and Texts 6, 167n59, 236n17 textbook 70, 123, 154, 157, 160–1, 171–3, 175–7, 182, 194n2; democratic 178; politics 172, 174; production 161 ; publishers 158–9, 173, 177, 197 The Politics of the Textbook 203 Therborn, G. 86, 88n22 Third World 13, 112n21, 187, 264–5, 267 traditions 5–10, 13, 47–8, 64, 73, 191, 204; conservative 37; critical 17n6, 28, 235, 262, 271, 274; cultural 260–1; liberal 32–3; Marxist 8, 34; neo-Marxist 19; political 4, 258, 271; religious 171, 275n5; selective 16, 22–4, 28, 38, 147–8, 171, 182, 195, 207; socialization 59; Western 171, 174, 179, 182, 199, 206, 208 unemployment 140, 179, 200; benefit cuts 110; youth 205 United States 5, 8, 11, 13–14, 71, 74, 211n49, 214, 219, 222, 227, 231–2, 258; Asian issues 187, 189–90; cheap french fries 186, 188–9,

191, 193, 264; class structure 75; conservative attack 172, 259; controversy 171; culture 204; curricular systems 123, 177; diasporic children 260; education 118; educators 261, 266, 268; foreign authors 156; home schooling 243; IMF policies 265; industry needs 93–5; labor process 88n5; national forms 225; official knowledge 174, 180; political Right 199–200; poverty 230; prepackaged materials 102, 109; professional organization 233; realities 262, 267; reforms 236; religious activism 249; school knowledge 153; schools 228–9; sociology of education 79; teacher unions 111, 176; teaching techniques 121; text production 154, 159, 173; traditional knowledge 179; women’s paid work 117; women teachers 125; white evangelicals 244 Weber 113n32, 153 Weis, L. 6, 69, 77, 165n9, 240n108, 270 Wexler, P. 30, 36, 80, 82–3, 88n17, 167n57 Whitty, G. 5, 7, 53, 78, 83, 85, 201, 206–7, 209, 211n64, 220–1, 223 Williams, R. 4, 7, 16, 20–7, 31–2, 41, 49, 103, 147, 150n46, 152, 156–7, 171, 208, 273 Willis, P. 5, 68n77, 72, 146, 148, 151n57, 167n62, 185n57, 189 women 14, 249; action 247–8; African American 195; health 17n5; paid work 117, 128, 195; Studies Groups 78, 88n6, 88n11; studies programs 273; work in the home 131n43 141, 246–7, 250 workers 76, 92, 96–7, 101, 105, 113n27, 117, 121, 138; clerical 86, 118; control of workplace 39, 127, 129n3; curriculum 49, 59; participation 95; Party 13; resistance 138–9, 143, 145; state 110–11; women 86, 125, 141, 143 working-class 76, 117, 203, 218; areas 55; children 141, 233; culture 146; schools 53, 58; struggles 14; students 133, 221, 230; women 86, 130n36; youth 72, 108 Wright, E.O. 74–5, 88n5, 101, 105, 113n29, 116, 129n6, 149n2 Young, M.F.D. 5, 19, 31, 79–80 Zeichner, K. 261, 270–4