The Struggle for Democracy in Education

Lessons from Social Realities

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138721159
• eBook ISBN: 9781351761789
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Struggle for Democracy in Education extends the insightful arguments Michael W. Apple provided in Can Education Change Society? It provides detailed examinations of both local and system-wide struggles around conflicting versions of democracy. Grounded in a key set of ethical and political responsibilities for those who care deeply about education, Apple and his co-authors interrogate conflicting models of democratic education, one interested in the common good and the creation of critical citizens, the other market-oriented and meant to meet a set of more conservative economic needs. Through a series of powerful international case studies, this volume explores the contested terrain, combining powerful theory with the "stuff" of schools, political and pedagogical actions, and the lives of individuals. These detailed examinations provide the reader with a more nuanced understanding of how policy, history, and varied actors with varied agendas come together, and the very real people and systems that are impacted by these conflicts. The Struggle for Democracy in Education asks us to face and understand these myriad forces and actors—both progressive and retrogressive—and to ask what we can do to ensure that the education that is created is worthy of its name. In the process, the book gives us real examples of critically democratic education and what we can learn from these struggles.

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The Struggle for Democracy in Education

Michael W. Apple

Seeing Contradictions

I want to begin this book with a story about the complex realities involved in the struggle for critical democracy in education. For a number of years, my wife Rima and I spent time working with activists, community groups, the ministry of education, critical educators, and others in one of the more progressive states in India. Its high rates of literacy were well known. The left-leaning government was expressly dedicated to improving the economic lives of the population, especially those at the bottom of the class and caste structure, and those who were identified as “tribal” peoples. The respect offered to different religious and cultural traditions was also seen as a model for other areas.

I don’t want to minimize these commitments at all; nor do I want to criticize the very evident hard work and sacrifices that went into creating and pushing forward this agenda. Indeed, these commitments and sacrifices were one of the major reasons that we had agreed to work with groups there.

The ministry of education had been influenced by critical pedagogical theories and practices, including the powerful work of Paulo Freire as well as some of my own work. It had also developed connections with groups engaged in movements such as “people’s science,” which aims to popularize and organically connect science to the lives of ordinary people, and similar local critically oriented educational strategies that were building “counter-hegemonic” educational programs from the ground up as well as from the top down.

There was a very visible commitment to improve the lives of young women and girls, an initiative that was of considerable interest to Rima as well as myself, since Rima is a well-known historian of women’s health. We wanted to see how this actually went on. Seeing things close up is crucial to us. We’ve had too many experiences of rhetorical reforms—including supposedly quite radical policies and programs—that sound so very good when seen from afar, but the words were often very different than the realities.

A primary initiative involved giving much more access to technological skills and knowledge in schools that served poor and marginalized students. It was thought that this emphasis would have benefits not only for poor children but for women as well, since they were doubly marginalized, not only by class and caste but profoundly by gender and by the patriarchal norms that were still so present in their communities.

Communities were consulted about the new programs. Even with the real scarcity of resources in education, the ministry worked hard to ensure that schools in these areas were given large numbers of computers. Time was set aside for their use and integration into the daily activities of the schools. Curricula were prepared that urged teachers to connect these new skills with the everyday experiences of the students and their lives.

Having already written about the worries I had about “technological fixes” for educational inequalities (Apple 2014), I was prepared to be somewhat skeptical about all of this. But Rima and I had learned to trust that the ministry and the activists working with them were serious in their conscious attempts to interrupt the role of education in reproducing social difference. Thus, we went in with an open mind that combined solidarity with the critical and progressive commitments that had been taken seriously before and yet still had some questions about the curriculum and the reliance on technology.

What we saw pushed us even further toward understanding the complex contradictions that can be present in critical education, contradictions that refocused our attention not so much on the curriculum and pedagogy in the school, but on the material realities of gendered specificities in daily life.

The sun beat down as we walked from the car to the school. The temperature was nearly 100 degrees with a humidity nearly as high. There was little respite from the heat inside the school. New computers lined the walls of the classroom. The teachers were hard at work with groups and individual students, most of whom were between the ages of 11–14. While they were clearly conscious that we were there, after a short time normal classroom routines took over.

The students were soon at the computers. At first glance, even with the oppressive heat and humidity, everything looked fine. But after a while watching and then interacting with teachers and students, Rima and I looked at each other and recognized that we both had come to the same realization about what was happening underneath the progressive aspects that were visible. Now the story gets more substantive about contradictions and the politics of intersecting dynamics of power in daily life.

What we had nearly simultaneously come to realize was that almost all of the students working so diligently at the computers were the boys. This was not “planned.” It wasn’t because the teachers were sexist in the usual sense of that word. It was more complicated than that.

In this school, there were no clean bathrooms for the girls. Boys faced a similar situation, but the boys could go behind the school buildings and urinate, something they regularly did. This was an act that had very different meanings and implications for the girls. To publicly urinate in an “open space” was to risk not only being seen as “dirty” but also to be seen as sexually “available.” The dangers associated with this in a climate of male dominance and female ­subordination—even with a government deeply committed to interrupting this—were not abstract. They were very real and based on all too many experiences.

Because of this, in order to “protect their modesty,” many girls did not attend school. The girls who did come to school tried very hard not to drink anything during the school day so that they would not have to urinate. With the heat and humidity so very high, many of the girls had no energy or even fell asleep at their desks.

None of this was planned. The ministry, in association with activists and critical educators, had prioritized a process of schooling that was meant to interrupt dominance and to provide a curriculum and a set of tools that lead to more democratic outcomes for poor and marginalized students, and that was overtly aimed at doing this for girls and young women. Very real economic sacrifices had been made to provide the students with the machinery, the curriculum, and teacher skills to give them experiences that were simply taken for granted by affluent parents and communities. In class terms, this was indeed progressive. Yet students have gendered bodies. The politics of bodies, built into the materiality of physical environments, powerfully interrupted the official attempt at interrupting dominance. “Simple” things like bathrooms and the gendered dynamics of schools and daily life contradicted the very well-intentioned class- and caste-based policies of a ministry that was trying so very hard to live out its commitments and to democratize the processes and outcomes of education. Why is there an economic choice between computers and bathrooms?

I begin this book with this story not to make us cynical. Cynicism has no place in the struggle to create an education that is worthy of its name. Rather my aim is to remind us that reality bites back and that we need to be conscious that building a lasting critically democratic education requires us to understand that doing so will at times be filled with tensions and contradictions. The politics of this will be complicated. It will involve a combination of joy and sometimes sorrow. Ignoring all of this won’t make it any easier. We are talking about the real lives of teachers, students, communities, and so many other groups of people who have a stake in the future of our societies. As much as we might wish it wasn’t the case, we can’t hide from the visible and invisible politics, and the conflicts these entail, involved in building and defending an education worthy of the best in us.

Democracy and a Transformative Education

The story with which I began this introductory chapter has serious implications for why we have chosen a key word in the title of this book. The struggle for democracy in education has been and still is exactly that—a struggle. It has a long and valued history. This history encompasses multiple movements to transform educational institutions so that their means and ends respond to the lived needs and aspirations of that ongoing experiment of creating critical and knowledgeable citizens. This has rightly required that we take seriously the demands of those who do not benefit from the ways our societies are currently organized—those “marked” by dominant understandings of class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and so much more (see Apple et al. 2009; Apple and Au 2014). It has also required a constant critical interrogation of who “we” are in the first place. All of this places an ethical and political, as well as educational, set of responsibilities on those who care deeply about the role of education in the larger society, a set of responsibilities that are even more compelling for those of us who are in education itself.

In Can Education Change Society? (Apple 2013), I argue for an activist role on the part of educators. In the process, I detail a number of tasks in which critically democratic educators should engage as “public intellectuals.” While I’ll say much more about this later in this book, among them are: bearing witness to negativity—that is, telling the truth about what is happening in education and the larger society; showing spaces of possibility where critically democratic policies and practices might flourish; and acting as critical secretaries of the actual realities of these possibilities as people build these more progressive policies and practices in the real world.

Can Education Change Society? constructed a set of arguments about the possible roles education might play in social transformation. It also examined the histories of a number of our attempts to answer this difficult question and gave concrete examples now and in the past of educators, community activists, and others striving to build a critically democratic education. There have been and are victories.

However, one of the most important things we must face is the fact that while we need to be optimistic about the possibility of creating lasting transformations, we should not be romantic. Critically democratic educators, progressive movements, and community members are not the only individuals and groups who are acting on this terrain. As I demonstrate at much greater length in Educating the “Right” Way (Apple 2006), neoliberals, neoconservatives, authoritarian populist religious movements, and new managerial regimes of authority are also working hard to change education so that it meets their own needs.

In essence, there is an ongoing contest over different versions of democracy. “Thick” understandings of democracy that seek to provide full collective participation in the search for the common good and the creation of critical citizens are up against “thin,” market-oriented versions of consumer choice, possessive individualism, and an education that is valued largely as a tool for meeting a set of limited economic needs as defined by the powerful. This has important implications for those of us who are committed to more robust forms of democracy and for an education that is richer in its visions of what education is for.

Because of this, we need to better understand what actually happens when these different ideas about democracy confront each other in schools and communities. This requires us to be honest that this is a time when rightist ideological visions, assumptions, and commitments are powerfully present, are well funded, and increasingly have b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Struggle for Democracy in Education
• 2 The Contradictions of a Critically Democratic School
• 3 Struggling for the Local: Money, Power, and the Possibilities of Victories in the Politics of Education
• 4 How “Democracy” Can Lead to Inequality: Class Relations and the Realities of Educational Reform
• 5 Can Critical Democracy Last?: Porto Alegre and the Struggle Over “Thick” Democracy in Education
• 6 The Struggle Continues: Lessons Learned and What Can Be Done
• Authors
• Index