RT19870_half title page 2/2/06 1:21 PM Page 1 Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology Education of RT19870.indb 2 3/3/06 1:41:21 PM RT19870_title page 2/17/06 2:33 PM Page 1 Ideology, Curriculum, and the New Sociology Education of Revisiting the Work of Michael Apple Edited by Lois Weis, Cameron McCarthy, and Greg Dimitriadis New York London Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business RT19870_RT19869_Discl.fm Page 1 Friday, March 3, 2006 3:15 PM Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue 2 Park Square New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN © 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-95155-0 (Hardcover) 0-415-95156-9 (Softcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-95155-5 (Hardcover) 978-0-415-95156-2 (Softcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005027550 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weis, Lois. Ideology, curriculum, and the new sociology of education : revisiting the work of Michael Apple / Lois Weis, Cameron McCarthy, and Greg Dimitriadis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-95155-0 (hb : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-95156-9 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Educational sociology--United States. 2. Education--Social aspects--United States. 3. Curriculum evaluation--United States. I. McCarthy, Cameron. II. Dimitriadis, Greg, 1969- III. Title. LB2802.S36H83 2006 371.2009794’985--dc22 2005027550 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group and the Routledge Web site at is the Academic Division of Informa plc. http://www.routledge-ny.com Contents Preface vii Geoff Whitty introduction 1 GreG DimitriaDis, Lois Weis, anD Cameron mCCarthy Section I Reisiting the New Sociology of Education Chapter 1 retrieving the ideological Past: Critical sociology, Gender Theory, and the school Curriculum 17 maDeLeine arnot Chapter 2 social Class, school Knowledge, and the hidden Curriculum: retheorizing reproduction 37 Jean anyon Chapter 3 schooling, Power, and the exile of the soul 47 CarLos aLberto torres Section II Contemporary Theoretical Challenges Chapter 4 riding tensions Critically: ideology, Power/ Knowledge, and Curriculum making 69 yoshiKo nozaKi Chapter 5 are We making Progress?: ideology and Curriculum in the age of no Child Left behind 91 Dennis CarLson  RT19870.indb 5 3/3/06 1:41:23 PM i • Contents Chapter 6 teaching after the market: from Commodity to Cosmopolitan 115 aLLan LuKe Section III On Spaces of Possibility Chapter 7 Contesting research rearticulation and “Thick Democracy” as Political Projects of method 145 miCheLLe fine Chapter 8 (re)visioning Knowledge, Politics, and Change: educational Poetics 167 anDreW GitLin Chapter 9 situating education: michael apple’s scholarship and Political Commitment in the brazilian Context 185 Luís armanDo GanDin afterword Critical education, Politics, and the real World 203 miChaeL W. aPPLe appendix interviews with michael W. apple 219 Contributors 251 index 257 RT19870.indb 6 3/3/06 1:41:23 PM PrefaCe Geoff Whitty one of the most stimulating periods of my academic career was the time i spent as a visiting professor at the university of Wisconsin– madison in the fall of 1979, just after the first publication of Ideology and Curriculum (1979/2004). That was a time in which the work of michael W. apple was rela- tively unknown in the united Kingdom, although michael had visited us during the 1970s and made contact with the likes of basil bernstein, michael young, roger Dale, and myself. michael young and i had also published one of michael’s papers in our book Society, State and Schooling (young & Whitty, 1977). Partly as a result of this, his work was initially taken up among british sociologists of education rather than in curriculum studies and other fields of educational studies. shortly after i returned to the united Kingdom, i was invited to write a review of the first paperback edition of Ideology and Curricu- lum for the British Journal of Educational Studies (bJes), house jour- nal of the then standing Conference on educational studies. it was the first review i had ever been asked to write for that journal, which was at the time a very traditional journal of the educational studies estab- lishment. i suspect Ideology and Curriculum was a book that puzzled the editors of BJES and that they approached me on the grounds that my work was also outside the mainstream and that i might just be able to make sense of this odd book from the united states. in 2004, of course, many people would see me, as Director of London university’s institute of education, as the very embodiment of the educa- tional establishment in the united Kingdom—and there is even a sense ii RT19870.indb 7 3/3/06 1:41:25 PM iii • Preface in which, much as he would hate to admit it, michael apple is himself part of the educational establishment in the united states and beyond. ironically, back in the 1970s, we both wrote about raymond Wil- liams’ concept of the “selective tradition.” although we largely applied it to the analysis of the school curriculum and school reform, it could also have been applied to the curriculum of educational studies itself. at that time, our own work was not part of the dominant culture of that field. it was still relatively marginalized in our own contexts. indeed, that sense of being outsiders was part of the common bond that drew michael and me together. We published for obscure leftist publishing houses and in radical journals. i remember michael being allocated small rooms at conferences like the american educational research association (aera) with such great attendance that people had to listen from the corridor. now all that has changed and our work has been brought into the mainstream. some people might even take the view that it has become part of the selective tradition of contemporary educational studies through a process of “incorporation,” another key concept in ray- mond Williams’ work used extensively by michael in Ideology and Curriculum. to Williams, this involved meanings being reinterpreted or being put into forms that supported or at least did not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture. i shall return to this issue later. When i first reviewed Ideology and Curriculum, i located it, over- simplistically, in a growing “critical” tradition in u.s. curriculum studies, linking it to the work of other “critical” scholars, as different as Jean anyon and henry Giroux, to a degree that, at least with hind- sight, was only partially justified. i also linked it, with rather more jus- tification, to the sort of neo-marxist social and cultural theory that had informed the so-called “new sociology of education” in the united Kingdom, starting with michael young’s Knowledge and Control (young, 1971) and the subsequent work that michael young and i did together (Whitty & young, 1976; young & Whitty, 1977). in my review, i suggested, as i did in extensive discussions at mad- ison in that fall of 1979, that Ideology and Curriculum did not ade- quately address some real difficulties in michael’s project. for example, linking the political economy of bowles and Gintis with the cultural analysis of bourdieu was not as straightforward as michael suggested. i also suggested that his reading of marxism was somewhat function- alist, producing a view of educational reality that, in stressing the ubiq- uity of domination, sometimes obscured the existence of contradiction and conflict. it was what i called a “complex correspondence” thesis. RT19870.indb 8 3/3/06 1:41:27 PM Preface • ix resistance and contestation were too little in evidence in the book, though i was already able to point to their growing importance in the new work that he had been developing during my time at madison. as i had said during our long conversations, he needed to say rather more about potential sites of contestation and the nature of counter hegemonic practice. michael’s subsequent books have become increasingly theoretically and politically sophisticated, although i know that some postmodern- ists, for example, would argue that he has annexed—or incorporated— their ideas in ways “that support or at least do not contradict other elements” in his original approach. similarly, the increasing empha- sis on race and gender issues has not always sat easily with the class analysis of the earlier work, although michael has now made a serious attempt to confront the difficulties entailed. Like me, michael has also been attacked by neo-Leninists for mis- understanding Lenin and Gramsci and thereby having an inadequate approach to political strategy. ramin farahmandpur (2004), michael’s latest Leninist critic, raises some important issues of strategy, just as David reynolds—now ironically an education advisor to new Labour in britain—did in relation to my own work in the 1980s (reynolds & sullivan, 1980). michael and i have discussed at length and written about some of these issues, which go well beyond the remit of Ideology and Curriculum, in a coauthored piece—indeed, our only co-authored piece—on “structuring the post-modern in educational policy” (apple & Whitty, 1999, p. 67). our 25-year interchange on these matters con- tinues to this day. an area on which i suspect michael and i differ somewhat is on the role of empirical research in critical scholarship. back in 1979, as i pointed out in the review, most neo-marxist accounts of schooling in britain were unduly abstract. Classroom research was unfortunately left to the symbolic interactionists and ethnomethodologists. i there- fore said approvingly that michael’s book made an attempt to illustrate the theory with empirical data drawn from, for example, an ethnogra- phy of a kindergarten classroom, content analyses of science and social studies curricula, and historical studies of curriculum reform. much of this was due, as michael generously acknowledged in the preface to the third edition, to the contribution made to Ideology and Curriculum by nancy King and barry franklin. reading my review again now, i think the situation has changed somewhat. Critical work in the united Kingdom has become more empirically grounded, for example, through the work of my colleague stephen ball and his various collaborators. meanwhile, the u.s work RT19870.indb 9 3/3/06 1:41:29 PM