The State and the Politics of Knowledge

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415935128
• eBook ISBN: 9781135951382
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The State and the Politics of Knowledge extends the insightful arguments Michael Apple provided in Educatingthe "Right" Way in new and truly international directions. Arguing that schooling is, by definition, political, Apple and his co-authors move beyond a critical analysis to describe numerous ways of interrupting dominance and creating truly democratic and realistic alternatives to the ways markets, standards, testing, and a limited vision of religion are now being pressed into schools.

CHAPTER 1

The State and the Politics of Knowledge

Michael W.Apple

Introduction

Formal schooling by and large is organized and controlled by the government. This means that by its very nature the entire schooling process—how it is paid for, what goals it seeks to attain and how these goals will be measured, who has power over it, what textbooks are approved, who does well in schools and who does not, who has the right to ask and answer these questions, and so on—is by definition political. Thus, as inherently part of a set of political institutions, the educational system will constantly be in the middle of crucial struggles over the meaning of democracy, over definitions of legitimate authority and culture, and over who should benefit the most from government policies and practices. That this is not of simply academic interest is very clear in the increasingly contentious issues surrounding what curricula and methods of instruction should be used in our schools. Think for instance of the whole languageversus- phonics debate and the immense political controversies this has demonstrated in local communities and in state legislatures. Or think of Diane Ravitch’s (largely erroneous) arguments that “real knowledge” is no longer taught and that political and educational “progressives” have captured the teaching and curriculum in most schools throughout the past century (Ravitch, 2000). Even though her assertions are both empirically and historically incorrect (Apple, 2001b), these and similar arguments have been circulated largely uncritically by the mainstream media, by increasingly conservative foundations, and by political groups.

The political nature of education is also made more than a little visible in the current attempts in many nations to change the mode of governance of education (Robertson & Lauder, in press). This involves conscious policies to institute neoliberal “reforms” in education (such as attempts at marketization through voucher and privatization plans), neoconservative “reforms” (such as national or statewide curriculum and national or statewide testing, a “return” to a “common culture,” and the Englishonly movement in the United States), and policies based on “new managerialism,” with its focus on the strict accountability and constant assessment that so deeply characterize the “evaluative state” (Clarke & Newman, 1997). When the efforts of authoritarian populist religious conservatives to install their particular vision of religiosity into state institutions are also added to this mix, this places education at the very core of an entire range of political and cultural conflicts.

In Educating the “Right” Way (Apple, 2001a), I raised serious questions about these kinds of current educational reform efforts now under way in a number of nations. I used research from England, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere to document some of the hidden differential effects of two connected strategies—neoliberal and authoritarian populistinspired market proposals and neoliberal, neoconservative, and middle-class managerial-inspired regulatory proposals. I described how 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 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 also criticized some of the dominant forms of supposedly counterhegemonic literature that urge us to move in more “emancipatory” directions. Thus, for example, I argued 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 common sense or on the building of counterhegemonic alliances among those people who, rightly, have raised serious questions about the ways our schools currently function. 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 common sense—all this cannot be wished away. Instead, these need to be confronted honestly and self-critically.

Yet education is thoroughly political in an even more practical and gritty way. In order to change both its internal dynamics and social effects as well as the policies and practices that generate them—and in order to defend the more democratic gains that committed educators and activists have won in many nations over the years (see, e.g., Apple & Beane, 1995)—we need to act collectively. Multiple movements around multiple progressive projects surrounding education and its role in all of the complex politics to which I have pointed above are either already formed or are currently in formation. Collective dilemmas warrant collective political responses.

These concerns raise important issues. How do we understand the role of education in responding to and helping to form collective and progressive political action? What is the place of politics in this? Is it possible to alter these politics? To cope with these and similar questions, we need critical theoretical, empirical, and historical tools; and we need examples of how these tools might be used productively. That is what this book is about.

For over three decades, critical scholarship in education has focused on the relationship between education and differential power. At first, much of the focus was reductive. A simple connection was presumed. Education was seen as simply a reflection of economic forces and relations. This “reproduction” approach—a variant of what has been called “identity theory” (things get their meaning by mirroring something else) in social theory—was criticized, reconstructed, and made much more dynamic and subtle over the years (Apple & Weis, 1983; McCarthy & Apple, 1988). In the process, approaches emerged that were considerably less reductive and essentializing and that recognized a much more complex set of contradictory relationships. These approaches have grown considerably over the years. Influenced by Gramscian frameworks, by cultural studies, by feminist and postcolonial theories, by the theoretical, empirical, and historical work of figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein, and Michel Foucault, and by other traditions, a good deal of the most creative work in critical sociological scholarship in general is now found within critical educational studies (see Apple, 1999; Arnot, 2002; Carlson & Apple, 1998; Dimitriadis & McCarthy, 2001).

Some of the very best analyses on education and power have been concerned with the way the state functions. The state can be loosely defined as “a distinct ensemble of institutions and organizations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions in the name of popular interests or the general will” (Wong, 2002, p. 1). This general definition has still required a considerable amount of conceptual, historical, and empirical work in order to go further. How do we think about the state? What role does “it” play? How is it challenged? What are the contradictory power relations within it and between the state and civil society? Perhaps the best ways of understanding and answering these questions can be found in the conceptual apparatuses developed around the concept of hegemony. As an entire range of critical scholarship has clearly demonstrated, this kind of approach can be employed creatively to uncover some of the truly major dynamics that determine the politics of education and that lead to social and cultural transformation. The most recent work complements, extends, and goes beyond some of the most cited investigations of the relationship between education and the state (see, e.g., Wong, 2002).

In thinking about the state, there are a number of things that must be done if we are to avoid the dangers of previous analyses. First, we need to recognize that the state is not simply there. It is constantly evolving, always in formation, as it responds to demands from social movements. Thus we need to restore motion to what with very few exceptions had been an all-too-static tradition of critical analysis, something that will clearly be seen in the work on the growth of rightist social movements around education in this volume.

But this is not all. Nearly all of the work on the state has focused its attention either on single nations or on nations in the West or the North. This simply will not do. Truly international studies are necessary. But just as important, we need comparative studies that both continue but also refocus our attention away from, say, England or Sweden, where a good deal of research on the state and education has been done. By decentering the West and the North, by refocusing our attention on those areas that have been historically neglected, a much more subtle picture of the relationship between the state and education can be built. Given this attention to the “non-West,” our analyses can become much more subtle and dynamic. We can study many more dynamics of power— not only class, but also race, gender, and colonial and postcolonial relations in all their complexities and contradictions—and do so with an eye to how these dynamics are formed in the contexts of histories and power relations that may be strikingly different from those we are used to focusing on. At the same time, we can also study the cultural politics of empire, of how empires engage in cultural control, of the social and cultural dynamics of what it meant to be a colony, and how social movements challenge such control from below and are themselves changed in the process. This kind of approach is important not only so that our analyses are more subtle; it is also crucial for critically oriented political and educational action.

In his discussion of schooling and class relations, David Hogan (1982) argued that education has often played a primary role in mobilizing oppressed communities to challenge dominant groups. It has been a set of institutions, an arena or site, in which groups with major grievances over culture and politics struggle for both recognition and redistribution (Fraser, 1997). In this complicated story, cultural struggles and struggles over schools in particular play a significant part in challenging the very legitimacy of political and cultural dominance. Thus education must not be seen as simply a reflection of forces outside itself. To paraphrase Ting-Hong Wong’s words, educational systems, rather than being merely a dependent variable determined by processes of state-building, profoundly affect consciousness, identity, cultural cleavage, and social antagonism. Thus the connections between schooling and state formation are two-way, reciprocal, and interactive (Wong, 2002, pp. 9–10). This position restores the relative autonomy of educational systems and at the same time demonstrates how the building of hegemonic relations both incorporates and remakes cultural processes and these relations themselves. By dealing with the specificities of situations that have not been previously studied, we are able not only to criticize previous theories of the role of schooling that have been accepted and too easily generalized, but also to show how very different hegemonic strategies may lead to very different political and cultural results. We can also begin to see much more clearly how to challenge dominance. This in itself is a considerable achievement and will be visible in a number of the chapters in this book.

The approaches that guide the work in this volume are significant for another reason. As I noted above, all too much of current critical cultural and social research in education has been rhetorical. It seems to assume that detailed empirical and/or historical substantiation of one’s arguments are beside the point. Because of this, it can too easily be dismissed as simply a set of slogans that can be ignored. And, predictably, this is what happens with depressing regularity. Of course, neoliberals and neoconservatives are already predisposed to reject such critical arguments (Apple, 2000, 2001a). But we help them along by writing as if evidence was an afterthought. The authors in this book will have none of this. In their detailing of the struggles over the state and over knowledge and meaning, and of what this means for a much more serious critical understanding of hegemonic struggles over culture and institutions in the state and civil society, a considerably more dynamic and nuanced set of pictures of the relationship between the state and education can be gained. And because their analyses are international—with chapters including detailed and insightful treatments of the politics of educational policy in for example the United States, Korea, Singapore, the nations of Scandinavia, Brazil, and internal nations and people within dominant nations—they are applicable to a much wider range of experiences and power relations than many other approaches.

Hegemony and the State

As I noted above, underpinning a number of the chapters in this book is one particular concept and the analytic framework that was developed to understand it—hegemony. The concept of hegemony was elaborated most productively in the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971). It refers to the ability of dominant groups in society to establish the “common sense” or “doxa” of a society, “the fund of self-evident descriptions of social reality that normally go without saying” (Fraser, 1997, p. 153). Hegemony is both discursive and political. It includes the power to establish “legitimate” definitions of social needs and authoritative definitions of social situations. It involves the power to define what counts as “legitimate” areas of agreement and disagreement. And it points to the ability of dominant groups to shape which political agendas are made public and are to be discussed as “possible.” As a concept it has enabled us to ask how alliances are formed and what effects such alliances have. It has opened up an entire terrain of questions concerning the ways in which the struggles over social meanings are connected to the structures of inequality in society. Questions such as the following come to the fore: “How do pervasive axes of dominance and subordination affect the production and circulation of social meanings? How does stratification along lines of gender, ‘race,’ and class affect the discursive construction of social identities and the formation of social groups?” (Fraser, 1997, p. 153).

As I have shown at much greater length elsewhere, hegemony is a process, not a thing. Furthermore, it is not monolithic. It does not constitute a seamless web, nor does it refer to a process whereby dominant groups exercise topdown and near-total control over meanings. Exactly the opposite is the case. Hegemonic power is constantly having to be built and rebuilt; it is contested and negotiated (Apple, 1995, 2000, 2001a). Thus, because society has a plurality of competing ethical and political visions and discourses, conflicts and contestation are constitutive dynamics in any hegemonic relations (Fraser, 1997, p. 154). Because of this, counterhegemonic groups and alliances are also crucial to any understanding of the relationships of power. Hence, for the authors of this book, the state is neither a simple nor a fixed object. Rather, along with Gramsci, we take the position that “the life of the state is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superceding of unstable equilibria” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). A sense of constant movement, of conflict and unstable compromises that ultimately lead to further movement, is a guiding understanding incorporated within this book. This is true not only of the state and its relations to civil society but also within the state itself. Even more important to the arena with which The State and the Politics of Knowledge deals, it is also true in terms of the constantly shifting role the state plays in producing and policing what counts as legitimate knowledge both within schools and in the larger society.

The State and the Production of Public Knowledge

Among the most crucial ways to understand the complex connections between education and power is to examine the politics of knowledge. One of the most powerful questions that can be asked in education is that offered by Herbert Spencer many years ago: “What knowledge is of most worth?” In the course of a number of books about the relationship between culture and power, I have sought to reword this question into “Whose knowledge is of most worth?” (Apple, 1986, 1990, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001a; see also Whitty, 1985). Either way of wording the issue points to one of the central concerns of curriculum studies, the sociology of education, and critical educational studies in general. Out of the vast universe of possible knowledge, only some knowledge and ways of organizing it get declared to be legitimate or “official.” Thus even the most practical of task in education—answering the question of what one should teach—has at its very basis a cultural politics. But the politics of curriculum doesn’t end with the knowledge itself. It also involves who should select it, how it should be organized, taught, and evaluated, and once again who should be involved in asking and answering these questions.

Yet even these issues are insufficient. Official knowledge is taught within specific kinds of institutions, with their own histories, tensions, political economies, hierarchies, and bureaucratic needs and interests. Therefore, thinking about school knowledge involves at the same time thinking about its internal and external contexts. Whether we like it or not, curriculum talk is power talk. There is, of course, a long tradition within curriculum studies and the sociology of education of recognizing this. Like many of the chapters in this volume, some of the best work on these issues has been international in nature, since one of the very best ways of more fully understanding how power works internally and externally in education is to compare what is taken for granted in one’s own nation or region with what is taken for granted in another (see, e.g., Green, 1990, 1997; Meyer, Kamens, & Benavot, 1992).

In order to engage in this kind of analysis, it is important to understand that official knowledge is the result of conflicts and compromises both within the state and between the state and civil society. This involves complex issues of political economy, of cultural politics, of the relationship between cultural legitimacy and state regulation, and of the ways in which and through which identifiable social movements and alliances form (Apple, 2000). Understanding these things has also involved tensions between different models of interpretation, including neo-Marxist, world-system, and poststructural/postmodern perspectives. It is in the sociology of curriculum particularly that the relationship between culture and power has continued to receive considerable attention, with what counts as “official knowledge” being one of the foci and what does not receive the imprimatur of legitimacy also being subject to attention. Thus the tradition represented in Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971) in the United Kingdom and first articulated in coherent form in the United States in Ideology and Curriculum (Apple, 1990) has been widened and deepened, not only both in its scope and sophistication but in the number of ways in which the connections between knowledge and power are interrogated (Apple, 1999). The State and the Politics of Knowledge extends this tradition even further to include some of the best new work both on the relations among education, power, and knowledge and on the struggles to defend or alter these relations. In addition, because many of the chapters included here focus directly on the current pressures to make schools conform to the ideological visions embodied in neoliberal and neoconservative policies, the book extends and widens the scope of many of the arguments I make in Educating the “Right” Way (2001a) and makes them truly global.

I noted above that the state clearly regulates the politics of official knowledge. Yet this recog...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The State and the Politics of Knowledge
• Chapter 2: Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements
• Chapter 3: Reading Polynesian Barbie: Iterations of Race, Nation, and State
• Chapter 4: Rethinking the Education-State Formation Connection: The State, Cultural Struggles, and Changing the School
• Chapter 5: What Happened to Social-Democratic Progressivism In Scandinavia? Restructuring Education In Sweden and Norway In the 1990s
• Chapter 6: Schooling, Work, and Subjectivity
• Chapter 7: Democracy, Technology, and Curriculum: Lessons from the Critical Practices of Korean Teachers
• Chapter 8: Educating the State, Democratizing Knowledge: The Citizen School Project In Porto Alegre, Brazil
• Chapter 9: Afterword
• Notes
• References
• Contributors