Knowledge, Power, and Education

The Selected Works of Michael W. Apple

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136307812
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

For more than three decades, Michael W. Apple has sought to uncover and articulate the connections among knowledge, teaching, and power in education. His germinal Ideology and Curriculum was a watershed title in critical education studies, and has remained in print since its publication in 1979. The more than two dozen books and hundreds of papers, articles, and chapters published since have likewise all contributed to a greater understanding of the relationship between and among the economy, political, and cultural power in society on the one hand "and the ways in which education is thought about, organized, and evaluated" on the other.

In this collection, Apple brings together 13 of his key writings in one place, providing an overview not just of his own career, but of the larger development of the field. A new introduction re- examines the scope of his work and his earlier arguments, and reflects on what remains to be done for those committed to critical education.

1On Being a Scholar/Activist

An Introduction to Knowledge, Power, and Education

Getting There

Books of collected works are always interesting to me. They require that the author reflect back on a trajectory that may not be totally clear even to the writer herself or himself. They ask a writer to construct a historical narrative that is simultaneously both personal and intellectual/political. In this introductory chapter, I want to engage with this combined task, to reflect on some of the history of the development of my work over time and, at the same time, to situate this development in some of the more per- sonal groundings that might explain how and why the work I’ve done came about. Let me start with a personal story.

It was late in the evening and I had just come home after a day of teaching—filled with the combination of exhaustion, tension, and sometimes pure joy that accom- panies working in schools. There was something waiting for me, a letter from Teachers College (TC), Columbia University. I opened it with much trepidation but the news was good. I was admitted to the Philosophy of Education program there. I had been accepted elsewhere, but this was the 1960s and in my mind “TC” was the place to be if one was deeply interested in challenging the taken for granted assumptions and prac- tices of schooling. To tell you the truth, I was surprised that I had been admitted. I had gone to two small state teachers colleges at night for my undergraduate degree, a degree that was not yet finished since I had to complete some required courses that summer. And, while working full-time as a printer before my part-time undergraduate career was interrupted by the army, my grade point average was, to be honest, pretty horrible. Luckily, TC focused on my post-army last two years of college work.

The army had “trained” me to be a teacher and many urban schools were facing a very serious teacher shortage. Thus, I began teaching without a degree in the inner city schools of Paterson, New Jersey—schools I had attended as a child¹ —and then moved to teach in a small rural and strikingly conservative town in southern New Jersey for a number of years where I predictably had some serious conflicts with ultra-conservative and racist groups (see Apple 1999). This fact may partly account for some of the reasons I focused on the growth in power of conservative social and religious move- ments in education and the larger society in a good deal of my later writing.

I had also been a president of a teachers union, a continuation of a family tradition of political activism. ² I loved teaching; but I was more than a little distressed by the ways in which teachers were treated, by curricula that were almost totally disconnected from the world of the children and communities in which I worked, and by policies that seemed to simply reproduce the poverty that surrounded me. Having grown up poor myself, this was not something that gave me much to be happy about as you might imagine. Taken together, all of this pushed me toward applying for a Masters degree, with the aim of returning to the classroom. But something happened to me at Columbia. I found a way, a “vocation,” that enabled me to combine my interests in politics, education, and the gritty materialities of daily life in schools. I ultimately con- tinued on for a doctorate.

Going to TC during the late 1960s was a remarkable experience in many ways. It treated intellectual work seriously and pushed me and others to the limits of what was possible to read and understand. For me, although I was already grounded in an intense family tradition of radical literacy, since I was coming from night school this was one of the first times in my formal educational career that I had been treated as if I could deal with some of the most complicated historical, economic, conceptual, polit- ical, and practical issues surrounding education. I loved it but at the very same time was dismayed by it. The reason for the dismay was because TC (and Columbia Univer- sity as a whole) was basically right next to Harlem and yet its relations with impover- ished schools and with the Black and Latino communities nearby were often tense. This very fact provided students like me with a bit of kindling for the gritty anger that many of us already felt. This of course was complemented by the reality that Columbia was a deeply politicized environment at the time. The fact that I had already been an activist in anti-racist, anti-corporate, and anti-war movements meant that the pressure cooker of studying at Columbia had to be balanced with the demands of political action. Somehow I and others did it.

In philosophy of education, I worked with Jonas Soltis, a fine analytic philosopher and teacher, and someone who recognized that there might be something worthwhile in my rough and not yet polished conceptual abilities. But Jonas also recognized that whatever my growing conceptual talents (and they were growing since he was indeed a good teacher), I was chafing at the lack of connection between the world of analytic philosophy and the struggles over curricula, teaching, and community participation in schools. While I was clearly influenced by the analytic work of Ryle, Austin, and espe- cially Wittgenstein, and by the historical treatments of the growth of significant philo- sophical traditions such as that of John Herman Randall, Jr., Jonas knew almost before I did that my real interests were centered on the politics of curriculum and teaching.

Near the end of my first year at TC, he sent me to see Alice Miel, the Chair of Cur- riculum and Teaching, and someone whose contributions to democratic curriculum have not been sufficiently recognized. And Alice sent me to see Dwayne Huebner. Her suggestion had a profound impact on all that I have done.

Very few doctoral students had finished with Dwayne. He was exceptionally demanding (of himself as well as his students) and he was among the most creative critical curriculum scholars in the history of the field.³ He said that we needed to rethink all that we thought we knew about society, about schooling, about nearly everything (see, e.g., Huebner 1999). Dwayne sent me away with a list of more than 50 books to read—in philosophy, social theory, literature and literary theory, and curricu- lum history. For some this would have been off-putting but for some reason, I took up the challenge and we met again—and again and again. I pored over the books. It was a bewildering array and yet I began to see a pattern, a set of ways in which our common- sense must be and could be challenged. My political and pedagogic commitment to understanding and interrupting common-sense that was so much a part of my political and educational activity earlier and that became the central focus of my work as a scholar/activist throughout my career later on was given direction. If this was a test, I guess I passed it. Dwayne and I spent hours discussing the material. He questioned me; I questioned him. And a mutual bond was built that has lasted for a very long time.

There are specific reasons for my not rejecting the challenging readings that Dwayne demanded that I read. As I will state in one of the chapters included in this book, when I was being trained as a teacher (I use the word trained consciously) and went to one of those small state teachers colleges at night, nearly every course that I took had a spe- cific suffix—“for teachers.” I took “Philosophy for Teachers,” “World History for Teachers,” “Mathematics for Teachers,” “Physics for Teachers,” and so on. The assumption seemed to be that since I had attended inner city schools in a very poor community and was going back to teach in those same inner city schools, I needed little more than a cursory understanding of the disciplines of knowledge and the theo- ries that stood behind them. Theory was for those who were above people such as me.

There were elements of good sense in this. After all, when I had been taught par- ticular kinds of theory, both at the small state teachers college and even at times later on in my graduate studies, it was all too often totally disconnected from the realities of impoverishment, racism, class dynamics, gendered realities, decaying communities and schools, cultural struggles, and the lives of teachers and community members. But the elements of bad sense, of being intellectually marginalized because of my class background and of so many people like myself being positioned as a “less than,” were palpable. For me and many others who grew up poor and who wanted to more fully understand both our own experiences and why schooling, the economy, and indeed the world itself, looked the way they did, the search for adequate explanations became crucial. Learning and using powerful theory, especially powerful critical theories, in essence, became a counter-hegemonic act. Getting better at such theories, employing them to more fully comprehend the ways in which differential power actually worked, using them to see where alternatives could be and are being built in daily life, and ulti- mately doing all this in what we hoped were non-elitist ways gave us two things.

First, all of this made the realities of dominance sensible—and at times depressing. But, second, it also provided a sense of freedom and possibility, especially when it was connected to the political and educational actions in which many of us were also engaged. These same experiences could be spoken of by members of many other groups who have been marginalized by race, sex/gender, class, colonialism, and by an entire array of other forms of differential power.

Thus, working with Dwayne Huebner was a deeply formative experience, as was becoming his teaching assistant. Dwayne sent me to The New School for Social Research, a center for radical intellectual work and a home for many of the most influ- ential figures in critical philosophy and social theory, to take courses in phenom- enology and critical social and cultural theory. My grounding in critical theory and in the work of Marx, Habermas, Marcuse, and others in that complex tradition can be traced to those experiences at The New School, as can the influence, in particular, of the sociology of knowledge of Alfred Schutz and the radical phenomenological positions embodied in figures such as Merleau-Ponty. At the same time, I began to read two of the people who had truly major influences on me as my work developed later on—Raymond Williams (see Williams 1961, 1977) and Antonio Gramsci (1971).

Dwayne insisted that I get to know Maxine Greene well, a person who also had a major influence on me. In essence, I did a joint degree in curriculum studies, philo- sophy, and sociology under the direction of Dwayne, Jonas, and Maxine. This combi- nation led to a dissertation that brought these traditions together, “Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in the Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge,” at the same time as it provided both the foundation and many of the guiding questions for much of my later work on the relationship among education, knowledge, and power.

Coming to Wisconsin

Dwayne had done his PhD at Wisconsin. He and his close friend, the noted curriculum theorist James MacDonald, told stories of Wisconsin and of their experiences there, compelling stories that documented its excellence, its political tradition, and the ways in which it provided a space for critical work. As I was finishing my degree in the spring of 1970, there was a curriculum studies position open there. Dwayne and Jim’s major professor, Vergil Herrick—originally a colleague of Ralph Tyler at Chicago and one of the leading curriculum scholars of his time—had died and his position needed to be filled. Herbert Kliebard was the other curriculum studies person at Wisconsin. Herb had studied at TC under Arno Bellack—a person with whom I too had taken a number of courses—in the generation before mine. Herb’s work on curriculum history had already made a significant impression on me and others. When he called and an interview was arranged, I was more than a little happy—and filled with a bad case of nerves.

My first experience of Madison, Wisconsin was arriving in the midst of a large anti- war demonstration. The power of the demonstrations (and they continue today), the intellectual and political openness of the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, the quality of the students there, the progressive polit- ical traditions of the state and the community—all of these combined to make me feel that I had found a home. No place is perfect, but Wisconsin continues to be a special place, an institution where I have spent over four decades. Even though I have been a Visiting Professor at many universities nationally and internationally, few have that rare combination of a critical core, an expectation of the organic joining of excellence and political/ethical commitment, and a democratic and participatory ethos that char- acterize the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Of course, like many places, neoliberal pressures are a threat to this combination of characteristics. But, though not impos- sible, it will be harder to transform Wisconsin than other institutions.

Knowledge and Power—First Steps

Wisconsin provided the space for truly serious critical work, work that could be engaged. It was an ideal place to be a “scholar/activist.” In the early 1970s, in addition to the other writing I was doing on teacher education, on critical studies of curriculum and evaluation, and on student rights, I began the initial work on a book that was to take nearly five years to complete, Ideology and Curriculum (1979/1990/2004).⁴ (Luckily, I had been given tenure in 1973 after only three years at Wisconsin, and was promoted to full professor after only three more years, so the pressure was off.) The aim of that early book was not only to revitalize the curriculum field, but also to chal- lenge both “liberal” educational policies and practices, and the reductive and essential- izing theories of the role of education that had become influential in critical analysis, books such as Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1976). In Ideology and Curriculum, I argued that education must be seen as a political act. I suggested that in order to do this, we needed to think relationally. That is, understanding educa- tion requires that we situate it back into both the unequal relations of power in the larger society and the relations of exploitation, dominance, and subordination—and the conflicts—that generate and are generated by these relations.

Others had said some of this at the time, but they were all too general. I wanted to focus on the connections between knowledge and power, since in my mind—and in that of many others—cultural struggles were crucial to any serious movements for social transformation. Thus, rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our (all too common) tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become “official”? What is the relationship between this knowledge and how it is organized and taught, and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and who does not? What can we do as critical educators and activists to change existing educational and social inequalities, and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just?

During the writing of Ideology and Curriculum, I came into contact with a number of people in England who were doing similar critical work on the relationship between knowledge and power. The “New Sociology of Education” in England had nearly exactly the same intuitions and used many of the same resources as critical curriculum studies did in the United States (see, e.g., Young 1971; Dale et al. 1976). As my analyses became popular there, international connections were cemented in place. This led to my first lectures in England in 1976 and created a set of intellectual and political bonds that continue to this day. I am certain that Ideology and Curriculum would not have been seen as such a major contribution without the political and academic influences of these colleagues in England, in particular Geoff Whitty, Roger Dale, Madeleine Arnot, Basil Bernstein, and Paul Willis. (This set of interactions and the mutually sup- portive influences and discussions that have gone on have continued over the years as the Institute of Education at the University of London became something of a “second home” for me and with my appointment as World Scholar and Professor there. Current and past colleagues at the Institute of Education, especially David Gillborn, Deborah Youdell, Stephen Ball, and Geoff Whitty, have kept the tradition of intense debate and friendship alive and well.)

Earlier, I mentioned the kinds of questions that Ideology and Curriculum raised. Yet, it is important to state that the book was grounded in a large array of issues and liter- ature. Indeed, Ideology and Curriculum enabled me to synthesize a considerable number of the influences that had been working through me for many years. Let me note them here, since many people see such early work as simply an expres...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Knowledge power and education
• World Library of Educationalists Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 On Being a Scholar/Activist: An Introduction to Knowledge, Power, and Education
• 2 On Analyzing Hegemony
• 3 Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling
• 4 Seeing Education Relationally: The Stratification of Culture and People in the Sociology of School Knowledge (with Lois Weis)
• 5 Curricular Form and the Logic of Technical Control: Commodification Returns
• 6 Controlling the Work of Teachers
• 7 The Other Side of the Hidden Curriculum: Culture as Lived—I
• 8 The Culture and Commerce of the Textbook
• 9 Cultural Politics and the Text
• 10 Consuming the Other: Whiteness, Education, and Cheap French Fries
• 11 The Politics of Official Knowledge: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense?
• 12 Producing Inequalities: Conservative Modernization in Policy and Practice
• 13 “We Are the New Oppressed”: Gender, Culture, and the Work of Home Schooling
• 14 Global Crises, Social Justice, and Teacher Education
• Contributors
• Index