Education and Power

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136499647
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In his seminal volume first published in 1982 Michael Apple articulates his theory on educational institutions and the reproduction of unequal power relations and provides a thorough examination of the ways in which race-gender-class dynamics are embedded in, and reflected through, curricular issues. This second edition contains a re-examination of earlier arguments as well as reflections on recent changes in education.

1

Reproduction, Contestation, and Curriculum

I

The Shadow of the Crisis

As I begin writing this the words of the noted sociologist Manuel Castells keep pressing upon me. “The shadow of the crisis spreads over the world.” The images he brings to mind provide some of the driving force behind this volume. For behind the ups and downs of the “business cycle” and behind the turmoil in education, both of which we hear so much about in the press, our daily lives and the lives of millions of people throughout the world are caught up in an economic crisis, one that will probably have lasting cultural, political, and economic effects.

It is affecting our very ideas about school, work and leisure, sex roles, “legitimate” repression, political rights and participation, and so on. It is shaking the very economic and cultural groundings of our day to day lives for many of us. Castells’s own images are worth quoting:

Closed factories, empty offices, millions of unemployed, days of hunger, declining cities, crowded hospitals, ailing administrations, explosions of violence, ideologies of austerity, fatuous discourses, popular revolts, new political strategies, hopes, fears, promises, threats, manipulation, mobilization, repression, fearful stock markets, militant labor unions, disturbed computers, nervous police, stunned economists, subtle politicians, suffering people—so many images that we have been told were gone forever, gone with the wind of post industrial capitalism. And now they are back again, brought by the wind of capitalist crisis.¹

The mass media bring us no escape from these images. If anything, their repetition and the fact that we cannot escape from seeing and experiencing them point to their reality. The crisis is not a fiction. It can be seen every day in the jobs, schools, families, government and health care and welfare agencies all around us.

In concert with this, our educational and political institutions have lost a large portion of their legitimacy as the state apparatus finds itself unable to respond adequately to the current economic and ideological situation. What has been called the fiscal crisis of the state has emerged as the state finds it impossible to maintain the jobs, programs, and services that have been won by people after years of struggle. At the same time, the cultural resources of our society are becoming more thoroughly commercialized as popular culture is invaded by the commodification process. They are processed and bought and sold. They too became one more aspect of accumulation.

The crisis, though clearly related to processes of capital accumulation, is not only economic. It is political and cultural/ideological as well. In fact, it is at the intersection of these three spheres of social life, how they interact, how each supports and contradicts the others, that we can see it in its most glaring form. The structural crisis we are currently witnessing—no, living—is not really “explained” only by an economy, therefore (that would be too mechanistic), but by a social whole, by each of these spheres. As Castells puts it, this is the case because:

the economy is not a “mechanism” but a social process continuously shaped and recast by the changing relationships of humankind to the productive forces and by the class struggle defining humankind in a historically specific manner.²

What this implies is the following. It is not only in an abstraction like the economy that one can find the roots of the difficult times we face. Rather, the key words are struggle and shaping. They point to structural issues. Our problems are systemic, each building on the other. Each aspect of the social process in the state and politics, in cultural life, in our modes of producing, distributing, and consuming serves to affect the relationships within and among the others. As a mode of production attempts to reproduce the conditions of its own existence, “it” creates antagonisms and contradictions in other spheres. As groups of people struggle over issues of gender, race, and class in each of these spheres, the entire social process, including “the economy,” is also affected. The struggles and the terrain on which they are carried out are recast. Therefore, the images of these struggles that Castells calls forth are not static, for people like ourselves live them in their daily lives (perhaps often “unconsciously”). And groups of these people constantly shape and are reshaped by these processes as the conflicts are engaged in.

While the crisis Castells describes is not wholly economic, the depth at which it is felt at an economic level needs to be pointed to if only to indicate how extensive it is.

Some of the figures are indeed shocking. While official unemployment rates of 7-8 percent are bad enough, the real unemployment rate in the United States may be closer to 14 percent. Though current figures are only now becoming available, the unemployment rate within the inner cities was as high as 60–70 percent among black and hispanic youth as early as 1975.³ Given the deterioration in the American economy (and those economies that are so interconnected with it), one has little reason to believe that this has been altered significantly downward.

Other findings concerning race and sex show another part of the picture. Even though women have struggled over the years to gain a more equal footing, recent data illuminate how difficult this will continue to be. As Featherman and Hauser have demonstrated, for instance, “while the occupational and educational achievement of women have kept pace with men …, the ratio of female to male earnings has declined from 0.39 to 0.38 for husbands and wives.” In fact, there has been little change in the percentage of this earning gap that can be accounted for by plain old sex discrimination. Discrimination accounted for 85 percent of the gap in 1962 and 84 percent in 1973, not a very significant change over all.⁴ While recent evidence suggests that this gap may be slowly changing in the professional sector⁵—and this is certainly a positive change—the fact is that only a relatively small percentage of women are actually employed in this sector.

What of other groups? The black and hispanic populations of the United States have much higher rates of under- and unemployment than others, rates that will significantly increase in the near future. A large proportion of these workers are employed in what might be called the “irregular economy,” one in which their work (and pay) is often seasonal, subject to repeated layoffs, poorer pay and benefits, and little autonomy. Like women, they seem to suffer a dual oppression. For not only is the social formation unequal by class—a point brought home, for instance, by the significant class differential in income returns from education but added to this are the powerful forces of race and gender reproduction as well. Each of these forces affects the other.⁶

Certainly gains have been made by specific portions of these groups. However, the raw statistics of these gains cover something rather consequential. The economy itself has shifted less markedly, either in its benefits or power based on race, sex, or class composition, than we might have supposed. The bulk of the advance has occurred through employment in the state.

One fact documents this rather clearly. Government—at the local, state, and national levels—employs over 50 percent of all of the professional blacks and women in the United States.⁷ It has only been through protest and struggle within the state that this has been effected.⁸ These jobs were not “given,” but are the result of groups of people pressuring year after year. Without such state hiring, the gains among these groups would have been drastically lower. As we shall see later on, in fact, the role the state plays in our economy and culture needs to be given a good deal of attention if we are to understand how an unequal society reproduces itself and how crises are dealt with. This will be of special importance in my discussions of the contradictory role of the school in such reproduction.

Conditions also seem to be worsening because of what has been called the dynamics of uneven development. That is, there is an increasing dichotomization between the haves and the have nots. We can see partial evidence of this in the fact that the wages workers in low-wage industries have been getting dropped over a twenty-year period from 75 percent of the average pay in high wage industries to 60 percent. A dual economy is created with an ever widening gap which, according to a number of political economists, will be next to impossible to reverse.⁹

But what of conditions on the job itself? I shall cite but a few pertinent statistics, though many more could fill up the pages of a number of books. In health and safety, the United States consistently lags behind other industrialized nations, with many occupations having a death and injury rate three to four times what one finds in England and Europe.¹⁰ Profit is more important than people, it seems. Yet many people do not even realize this. Both blue- and white-collar work is often maddeningly boring and repetitive. Workers have little formal control over their labor, and this centralization of control is growing in offices, stores, universities and schools, factories, and elsewhere.¹¹ Pensions are being lost and hard-won benefits weakened. While service jobs increase (to be largely filled by lower-paid women), other jobs are disappearing as runaway corporations move their plants to areas with a less organized, cheaper, and more docile work-force. And even these additional service jobs are suffering more and more from added workloads, a lack of responsibility for the organization of their jobs, increasing insecurity, and a paucity of serious social services to support them. Furthermore, it is estimated that conditions may worsen since the economy is currently producing only about half of the total new jobs that will be required in the future.¹²

For many women it is often worse. Since so many of them work in “pink-collar” jobs and in the competitive low-wage sector (that is, stores, restaurants, small offices, and labor-intensive industries such as clothing and accessory manufacturing), they are frequently condemned to relative material impoverishment.¹³ The same is true of minority workers, a large portion of whom work in the competitive sector. Working conditions here are much worse and, again, unemployment and underemployment, inadequate health and pension benefits, and weak or non-existent labor unions seem to be the rule.¹⁴

When this is coupled with the deteriorating purchasing power of most workers’ pay, the class and sex differential in that pay, the loss of control on the job, the decline of cities and cultural supports and human ties, and the astronomical costs in mental and physical health these conditions entail, it makes one pause even further. For the images that Castells calls forth describe the conditions that an increasing portion of the population within and outside the boundaries of the United States will face. What these conditions signify, the structural reasons for them, are not made evident due to the hegemonic control of the media and the information industries.¹⁵ We castigate a few industrialists and corporations, a small number of figures in government, a vague abstraction called technology, instead of seeing the productive and political apparatus of society as interconnected. In part, though, we cannot blame ourselves for not recognizing the situation. The unconnected version is what we are presented with by the cultural apparatus in its dominant forms. It takes constant attention to detail by even the most politically sensitive of the working men and women in our society to begin to put it all together, to see these images as realities that are generated out of the emerging contradictions and pressures of our social formation and its mode of production. We live through a crisis in legitimation and accumulation—where the productive and reproductive apparatus of a society (including schools) are riven with tensions, where the very essence of the continued reproduction of the conditions necessary for the maintenance of hegemonic control is threatened—yet it is so hard to see the patterned impact all this has on the practices in our daily lives. This is especially difficult in education where an ameliorative ideology and the immense problems educators already face leave little time for thinking seriously about the relationship between educational practices and discourse and the reproduction of inequality.

As we shall see, though, the men and women who work in our offices, stores, shops, factories, and schools have not been totally quiescent in the face of all this, a fact that will be made rather clear in my later discussions of cultural forms of resistance. But, the facts that the objective conditions they face are not easy and the perspectives made available to understand them are not very powerful must be recognized at the outset.

This gives a view of the side on which many workers and employees sit. But what about the other side, the side that has much greater control of our culture, politics, and economy? The picture here is one of rapid centralization and concentration of economic and cultural resources and power. A few examples are sufficient to indicate the extent of, say, corporate control. The top one hundred corporations increased their control of industrial assets from 40 percent in 1950 to nearly 50 percent in 1969, a figure that is even higher today. Of the more than two million businesses in the United States today, the two hundred largest corporations take home over two-thirds of the total profit in the entire country. After-tax corporate profits in 1970 were three times what they had been just ten years earlier. In insurance, the top ten concerns control over 60 percent of all assets. This very same phenomenon is found in banking and the communication industries, as well as in the growing national and international power concentrated in financial and industrial corporate conglomerates. The investment patterns of these industrial and financial concerns reveal what one would expect, the maximization of capital accumulation and profit—with human welfare, public goals, high employment, and so on distant runners up when they are considered at all. From all of this, it should be quite clear that the interests of capital control our economic life and our personal well-being to no small extent.¹⁶

These data present a less than attractive view of the structural conditions in which many of our citizens find themselves and of the unequal power in our society. Yet, one could still claim that these are aberrations. On the whole we are becoming a more equal society; just look around you. Unfortunately, this may be more wish than fact. As the authors of Economic Democracy note:

As numerous academic and government studies have demonstrated, the distribution of wealth and income in the United States has changed little in the direction of greater equality since the turn of the century and hardly at all since World War II.¹⁷

Even with this maldistribution and the widening centralization and concentration, we know that stagnation and inflation beset the economy. Capital accumulation and legitimation are threatened. The debt level of these very same corporations has risen markedly, in part because of the financing of technological innovations due to increased international competition.¹⁸ New markets “need” to be developed; workers need to be brought under greater control and discipline; productivity needs to be increased; new technologies need to be developed at an ever-growing rate; and the techniques and expertise required for engaging in all of this need to be generated. The role of the worker is critical here since it has been found that the rate of exploitation of one’s workers is an exceptional predictor of the profit levels of an industry.¹⁹ That is, one of the most important means by which firms may deal with the economic “problems” they confront is to refocus on their work-force and increase the level of exploited labor they can gain from it.

The state and the school will not be immune from these pressures. Social austerity “needs” to be regained. Governmental policies need to correspond to the requirements of capital. Educational practices need to be brought more closely into line with work and the costs of the research and development prerequisites of industry have to be socialized by having them taken over by the state and the university. These conditions in the workplace and the political sphere also create their own problems, however. Intensified competition makes the replacement of technologies necessary well before they are fully paid for by profits. Workers react against a good deal of this. Progressive groups, educators, and parents may challenge the closer linkages between the state, factories, boardrooms, and schools. Blacks, hispanics, and many other workers reject the position that they must pay for the economic contradictions plaguing society. And inflation and social tension are raised again. Hence, in the midst of this, the seeds of continued conflict and crisis grow.

This gives the barest glimpse of the actual circumstances many of our citizens experience. If Castells and so many others are correct, we cannot expect it to get better soon in any significant way. What we can do, however, is to face the structural crisis honestly and see how it works its way out in one of our major institutions of reproduction, the school. We must do this even if it means criticizing some of the basic ways our educational institutions currently operate. To do this, though, we need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the 1995 Edition
• Preface to the Ark Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Reproduction, Contestation, and Curriculum
• Chapter 2. Technical Knowledge, Deviance, and the State: The Commodification of Culture
• Chapter 3. The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum: Culture as Lived — I
• Chapter 4. Resistance and Contradictions in Class, Culture, and the State: Culture as Lived — II
• Chapter 5. Curricular Form and the Logic of Technical Control: Commodification Returns
• Chapter 6. Educational and Political Work: Is Success Possible?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index