Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education
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Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education

Essays on Class, Ideology and the State

Michael W. Apple, Michael W. Apple

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eBook - ePub

Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education

Essays on Class, Ideology and the State

Michael W. Apple, Michael W. Apple

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About This Book

First published in 1982, this collection of essays provides an analysis of education's contradictory role in social reproduction. It looks at the complex relations between the economic, political and cultural spheres of society, both historically and at the time of publication, and hones the wider range of debate in on education.

This volume will be of interest to those studying sociology and equality in education.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351852579
Topic
Bildung
Edition
1

Chapter 1

Reproduction and contradiction in education:
an introduction

Michael W. Apple

Introduction
Much of the current discussion about the role of schooling in advanced industrial societies has been stimulated by a large quantity of scholarship that is critical of what educational systems may do. In essence the disagreements have centered around four interrelated issues: (1) Do schools primarily reproduce the social division of labor or are they avenues for lessening the existing inequality of power and knowledge in our society? (2) Are schools ‘strongly determined’ by ideological, economic, and cultural forces outside of them or do they have a significant degree of autonomy? (3) Do theories of economic reproduction adequately respond to the cultural and ideological roles played by education? (4) What actually happens within the school (the curriculum, the social relations, the language and culture considered legitimate) that may provide answers to these questions?
There can be no longer any doubt that schools do seem to be institutions of economic and cultural reproduction. However, the way this goes on within educational institutions is exceptionally complex. A number of the recent theories of the relationship between education and an ‘external’ society miss important aspects of this complexity. One cannot fully understand it using many of the models of analysis which dominate research on these four original questions in isolation from the others.
For example, most scholarship on the question of the effect of schools in economic reproduction treats elementary and secondary schools as ‘black boxes.’ It uses input/output measures of achievement and mobility without engaging in in-depth analyses of how these effects are created in the school (Apple 1978). Further, it neglects the fact that (as recent research in France, England, Sweden, and the United States has shown) schools are cultural as well as economic institutions. Hence, an analysis of the formal and informal culture of schools and other educational institutions, and the knowledge that gets in and is taught in them, is quite important, for as this research has documented, both the curriculum and the culture of schools have a profound impact on students’ life chances and can illuminate the ties schools have to the surrounding social order. Unfortunately, however, a good deal of the research on cultural reproduction has neglected the concerns and insights of those scholars investigating economic reproduction. Thus, both groups often speak past each other. In many ways this is quite unfortunate since beneath the overt differences many aspects of each of these positions clearly complement each other.
Added to this problem of isolation is another. The relationship between economic and cultural reproduction and education is not ‘merely’ one found in the formal institution of the school. The cultural apparatus of a society is much broader than that covered either by the formal corpus of the school curriculum or the more tacit hidden curriculum. We need to understand other aspects of a society’s modes of communicating and creating what Raymond Williams (1977) has so felicitously called an ‘effective dominant culture.’ Because of this, analyses of mass media, popular culture, and the role of the arts become critical if we are to fully comprehend how education and reproduction are linked beyond the classroom as well.
In essence, what we are beginning to see is a profound shift in our very notion of culture, one which ‘rescues it from elitist or narrowly literary or artistic usages’. At the same time, we are witnessing a break with mechanistic theories about people and their consciousness. These shifts themselves rest on a marked alteration in the relationship between intellectuals and working people (Clarke, Critcher, Johnson 1979:58) for we have had to take seriously the real everyday experiences and objective conditions in which people find themselves.
Yet even with this shift, all too many theorists of both economic and cultural reproduction in education focus on the economy and culture in abstract ‘received’ terms and categories. They have not developed adequate tools that would enable them to specifically analyze the actual and concrete cultural, political, and economic meanings and practices of various groups within our social formation. This is especially unfortunate in education since here the everyday meanings and practices constitute the warp and woof of reproduction, contradiction, and contestation in important ways. As I have argued at length elsewhere, in schools, for example, the form and content of the curriculum – both hidden and overt – are clearly significant in this regard, as are the forms of social interaction that dominate such institutions (Apple 1979a). The same claims can be made about the family, the state, the media, the workplace, and elsewhere.
This neglect of the concrete meanings and activities of culture and people as they interact in our institutions is unfortunate in another way. It limits the very ability we have to think about how these institutions may reproduce the relations of domination and ideological conflicts in which we are interested. That is, many of our ‘received’ categories are not totally sufficient for analyzing the actual processes and sites where the creation and recreation of the hegemony of dominant classes and class segments goes on. For this hegemony is not something abstract. It is not something that exists merely at the ‘roof of our heads’, so to speak, nor can it be fully encompassed by concepts such as control, manipulation, or indoctrination (Williams 1977:110). Rather, as Williams so nicely puts it (1977:110):
[Hegemony] is a whole body of practices and expectations 
: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming
. It is, that is to say, in the strongest sense, a ‘culture,’ but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dominance and subordination of particular classes.
Hegemony is not found in one’s head, then, but made up of our day-to-day cultural, political, and economic (ideological) practice, a set of practices which help create us. As both Gramsci and Althusser remind us, ‘ideology is a practice producing subjects’ (Mouffe 1979:187).
To primarily focus on culture – either in its lived or commodified forms – as we have done here for the past few pages can itself be awfully limiting, however. For in the process we may tend to neglect the crucial issues related to mode of production and objective class structure that the investigators of economic reproduction have so rightly brought to our attention. We may forget how very important and real the connections among the economy, ideology, culture and other aspects of a society are.
Given this, any serious analysis of education and reproduction must account for a number of complex interconnections. It must concern itself with the role of the educational apparatus in roughly reproducing a labor force stratified by sex and class. It requires a concomitant investigation of the way education functions in the process of class formation and struggle, capital accumulation and the legitimation of the privileges of dominant groups. But schools do not exist in a political vacuum. They are structurally limited by the power of the state, an area which has remained systematically underdeveloped theoretically in the literature on education. Hence, the role state intervention plays in legitimating and setting limits on the responses that education can make to the processes of stratification, legitimation, and accumulation is essential. These are, of course, not only questions of current interest. The processes of reproduction have a history, a history that needs to be uncovered if we are to know the possibilities of action today.
These previous issues tend to be oriented toward an appraisal of the role of education in economic reproduction. However, as I noted, the educational apparatus of a society is also an important set of agencies in the cultural reproduction of class relationships. In order to understand this we need to respond to the role of the arts and mass media outside the school, to the actual social relations and the knowledge within the school, and finally, to the way people respond to the ideological and cultural messages these institutions are presenting. For we may find that ‘simple’ reproduction is not the only thing occurring. Cultural forms may have some autonomy or may be much more contradictory than we might have supposed. Thus, cultural reproduction (and how it relates back to economic reproduction) needs just as thorough an analysis as the role of education in class formation, and in reproducing and legitimating economic stratification and capital accumulation.
Answers to these kinds of problems have usually required that one take seriously both the questions and the techniques that have arisen out of the Marxist tradition. Yet aside from some important work in the last ten or so years, this tradition has been markedly absent in educational investigations. Though it has been kept alive with remarkable tenacity by individuals in, say, England and elsewhere, it is only recently that serious work has again emerged in the United States.
The chapters included here, and the volume as a whole, represent attempts to come to terms with the influence of Marxist approaches to educational analysis. While not all of the authors will agree on the specifics of the efficacy of certain elements of a Marxist program, all of them speak from a joint interest. This is a concern with the structural roots of domination and exploitation. Thus, something is taken as already well documented by these authors. Society is structurally unequal and this inequality by race, gender, and class is truly structural.1 That is, it is not a fixable maladjustment in the social machinery, but is rooted in and reproduced by the economic, political, and ideological forms which currently exist. The question is not the reality of differential power, but how that power is made manifest, in which spheres it operates, and who ultimately benefits.
I want to stress that this does not mean that answers to these questions are pregiven. It does mean, however, that the fundamental problematics the reader will encounter here are engaged. They seek to understand how the economic and cultural practices involved in education contribute to the reproduction of these structural relations, to contradictory tendencies within these relations, and to possibilities for organized action upon them.
Hence a particular conceptual apparatus will be employed in this volume, one which depends on terms such as class, gender, hegemony, ideology, capital, the State, reproduction, contradiction, division of labor, and so on. No simple definition is sufficient to convey the richness of these concepts if they are used in an undogmatic way. Therefore, I shall not attempt to provide any such definitions here. Instead, the meaning of these terms and their conceptual and political grounding will emerge from their use. The test of their fruitfullness is in their applicability to the interrogation of concrete situations. I believe that the essays collected here can go a long way in providing for both the building of a consistent framework that may be applied to the specificity of real conflicts and practices in education, as well as providing instances of such application.
This sense of engagement is coupled with a particular kind of tension, a tension that will be evident to those readers who are familiar with the larger controversies within current scholarship on the relationship between culture, politics, and the economy on the one hand and the (somewhat more derivative) investigations of the social and ideological ‘functions’ of education on the other. In simple terms, there are major tensions and controversies within each of these traditions. In very many ways, the chapters which follow are both responses to and/or influenced by both sets of tensions. To make this clear, it might be wise to briefly examine some of these major disputes within the literature. In so doing, we shall then want to relate these to the more complex and general issue – the relationship ‘between’ base and super-structure – that lies behind nearly all of these controversies.
Culture and economy in education
At the outset of this introductory chapter, I noted that two unfortunately relatively disparate traditions have come to the fore in scholarship on reproduction in education. Clearly, these are really only ideal types since many individuals have been influenced by both.
A primary concern with culture and power, with the form and content of the knowledge and symbols found in education and the relations of domination and exploitation found outside these institutions, is evident in the very titles of many of the major volumes that have had an impact during the past decade. Knowledge and Control, Education as Cultural Imperialism, Education and Social Control, Class, Codes and Control, Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, and many others speak to these concerns.2 The interest in education, power, and economic results – a somewhat different problematic – is just as evident in titles such as Inequality, Schooling and the Rise of the Corporate State, The Sorting Machine, Schooling in a Corporate Society, Schooling in Capitalist America, and Who Gets Ahead?3 Rather than culture, the focus in these volumes has been primarily on the relationship between education and the individual or class composition of the occupational structure, as well as on economic power.
Obviously, there have been serious attempts to bring these two perspectives together in the past. Karabel and Halsey’s (1977) timely volume represents a valuable effort to both give a sense of the state of the field and to synthesize the varying economic and cultural approaches then extant. Basil Bernstein’s (1977) continuing efforts to show how economy, class and culture are interwoven in education and the Open University materials on Schooling and Society (Dale et al. 1976; Mac-Donald 1977) provide other examples. My own studies over the last decade or so, published in Ideology and Curriculum (1979a) present one more instance of a consistent attempt to bring together the dual concerns of the political/economic and the cultural/ideological outcomes of education. Let us look at some of the issues each of these concerns raises in somewhat more detail.
We are coming to know a good deal about the relationship between the economic reproduction of class relations and education. As Erik Olin Wright (1979:xxi) has recently demonstrated, for example, classis a primary explanatory device in any account of the evident differential returns to education for blacks and whites, and between men and women. In fact, the differences in economic benefits gotten from education that separate economic, racial and gender groups are strongly related to where one stands in the class structure. This is not to say that racial and sexual oppression are not real and powerful forces. Rather, it is to say that they are dynamically interconnected with the relations of economic domination and exploitation that exist.
Wright documents some rather i...

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