Ideology and Curriculum

Michael Apple, Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429682490
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Since 1979, Ideology and Curriculum has been a path breaking statement on the relationship between cultural and economic power in education. The new edition of this now classic text has been updated by celebrated author and activist Michael W. Apple to include a full new chapter on the book's lasting critical agenda in the context of the contemporary conservative climate. A new substantive preface introduces the fourth edition, reflecting on earlier arguments and developments from the intervening years while a concluding interview details the author's background and continuing efforts toward building a more equitable society. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its publication, this highly-anticipated new edition firmly situates Ideology and Curriculum as one of the most important education titles of our time.

1 On Analyzing Hegemony

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:²

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.

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 intimately 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.

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 inconsequential 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 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 incidentally 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 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 aw...