Official Knowledge

Democratic Education in a Conservative Age

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136706790
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This third edition of Official Knowledge, a classic text from one of education's most distinguished scholars, challenges readers to critically examine how certain knowledge comes to be "official, " and whose agendas this knowledge represents. A probing and award-winning study, this new edition builds on the tradition of its predecessors to question the rightist resurgence in education while substantive updates throughout show how such policies continue to define our commonsense notions about what counts as a good school.

A new preface and two full, new chapters address current controversies over curriculum and textbooks, and extend the discussion of previous editions to reflect on some of the most important pressures being placed on higher education as well. Apple also considers the recent conversion of some prominent neoliberal, neoconservative, and managerial thinkers to more critical understandings of educational policies, proving that progressive change is possible if we examine the roots of these ideologies in the first place. As insightful as it is thorough, Official Knowledge is a refreshing call to challenge the dominant forces within education today, as Apple powerfully illustrates how larger social movements are only possible if we purposefully and inclusively deepen our understanding of the existing body of knowledge about education.

Regulating Official Knowledge

DOI: 10.4324/9780203814383-4

Introduction

As I noted in the preceding chapter, nearly half of the states in the United States have some process by which curricular materials, usually textbooks, are evaluated and endorsed at a state level. Publishers differentiate between two kinds of states. In what is called “open territory”—most of the East, Midwest, and Far West— publishers sell directly to school districts or individual schools. In “closed territory”—mostly in the South and Southwest—centralized adoption policies prevail.¹ Individual districts in the “closed territory” can usually buy nearly any book, but state funds can only be used to purchase approved texts. Of all the states in the “closed territory,” Texas and California (and now increasingly perhaps Florida) have the most power over what counts as official knowledge.

The influence of such state adoption policies should not be underestimated. The sheer economics of it is quite important. Take Texas as an example. Texas spends tens of millions of dollars on instructional materials and at this writing has a rather narrow policy of approving five textbooks or less (the minimum is two) for each subject. This puts it in an exceptionally strong position to influence the content of texts as publishers compete to gain their share of what is obviously a lucrative part of the market.² The various factions of the Right understand this all too well.

Texas has other characteristics that make it powerful besides the stringent limits it places on the number of texts it approves. Texas not only has a rapidly growing population that puts it second only to California in the “closed territory” in sheer numbers of students for which it buys books, but it adopts for both elementary and secondary schools. Furthermore, again at this time of writing, purchase contracts between the state and textbook publishers are for eight years, thereby guaranteeing that large market for a considerable length of time. Finally, and not unimportantly, Texas uses a method of payment that is in many ways a publisher’s delight. It has a single-payment system in which one large check pays for the state’s entire purchase of particular textbooks. To quote one publisher, “The money we get from sales in Texas is fast and clean.”³

While Texas may be the most visible economically, the recent choice by California to reject all of the submitted textbooks in one subject area—and the shock waves that rippled through the educational and publishing communities— demonstrates its own considerable ability to exert pressure on the content and form of official knowledge. Along with Texas, it controls nearly 25 percent of the market in textbooks.⁴ In the process, both have an immense impact on what gets published for schools in the entire nation.

In my discussion here, I want to begin to illuminate one major element in this process of making knowledge official: the complicated politics of the text that is seen in such state adoption policies. Part of my task here will be theoretical. How do we think about this process? This will require that I make some arguments about the role of government (the “State”)⁵ in making some groups’ “cultural capital” more legitimate than others’. And other parts of my task will be political, historical, and empirical. What happens within this process? What are its roots in the past? What can we learn about this that can help us challenge the newly emerging hegemonic accord? This will require that we examine some of the previous and current conflicts over state adoption policies. Let us turn to some initial theoretical points about the role of the State first. However, those readers who have less tolerance for such theoretical labors can turn to the section on “‘Incompetent’ Teachers, ‘Unethical’ Publishers” that follows the next three sections without jeopardizing too much of the historical story I wish to tell.

Symbolic Control and the State

While there is a formal right for everyone to be represented in the debates over whose cultural capital, whose knowledge “that,” “how,” and “to,” will be declared legitimate for transmission to future generations of students, it is still the case that, as I noted in the preceding chapter, a selective tradition operates in which only specific groups’ knowledge becomes official knowledge.⁶ Thus, the freedom to help select the formal corpus of school knowledge is bound by power relations that have very real effects. Perhaps a sense of how this formal right operates in real material conditions can best be seen in another area of the cultural apparatus of a society, the press.

Freedom can be defined in two different ways, negatively and positively. Speaking specifically about freedom of the press, Ernest Mandel puts the negative case this way:

The negative definition of freedom means the absence of censorship and of institutions a priori denying average citizens (or organizations of citizens) the opportunity of printing and diffusing their opinions. In that negative sense, freedom of the press means the formal right of all to publish whatever they wish, at least in the field of beliefs, opinions, commentary on events, and general information.⁷

Mandel goes on, now turning to the positive sense of freedom:

The positive definition of a free press means the effective material capacity of individuals or groups of individuals to have their opinions printed and circulated. If it costs $10 million to found a daily newspaper, and many more millions to run it, the abstract “right” to do this—that is the absence of any law or institution prohibiting it—will be of little avail for the overwhelming majority of citizens. It will be like the right to become a millionaire, when in fact less than 0.5% of the population accumulate such wealth.⁸

These points are significant. Notice that the positive sense of freedom is linked to existing relations of power. The right of cultural distribution is partly dependent on economic and political conditions, no matter what the Right would like us to think about the supposed neutrality of the “free market.” This means that one cannot simply assert that all parties have a “right” to make their knowledge public. The question of the right to determine what counts as legitimate content cannot be answered in the abstract. We need to focus on the actual economics and politics of regulation. What counts as legitimate knowledge and one’s right to determine it is lodged in a complicated politics of symbolic control of public knowledge. Since it is public, that is, since it is declared to be “knowledge for all,” it is subject to scrutiny by official bodies (and is subject to the drives and tendencies of a market). In most countries, this means that some level of government is officially charged with the duty of creating a selective tradition.

In fact, one of the most interesting historical dynamics has been the extension— gradually but still graphically—of the direct or indirect State authority over the field of symbolic control. Education has become a crucial set of institutions through which the State attempts to “produce, reproduce, distribute, and change” the symbolic resources, the very consciousness of society.⁹ These institutions, of course, have often been sites of intense conflict over whose symbols should be transmitted and over whose principles should organize this transmission.¹⁰ At the center of these conflicts, however, sits the State.

In the past, as critical work on the curriculum began to emerge as a serious force in educational research, all too many people assumed that the State would uniformly support only the knowledge of dominant groups. In a capitalist economy, only the knowledge required by economically powerful groups would become legitimate in publicly supported schools. However, as Carnoy, I, and others have documented, this is far too simplistic and is historically inaccurate.¹¹

The State is not guaranteed to serve the interests of a unified dominant class. Instead of this “instrumentalist” view, the State, like civil society, is a site of interclass struggle and negotiation, “a sphere of political action where the interests of dominant classes [and gendered and racial groups] can be partially institutionalized and realized” as well.¹²

It is not only the case, however, that the State acts as an arena of interclass, race, and gender conflict and negotiation. It also, and very importantly, serves as a site for intraclass conflict and compromise. That is, there is a second logic, which informs State action. The State tends to balance the opposing interests of different segments of dominant groups.¹³

To further complicate matters, but also to be true to the historical record, as I have argued earlier, since the State is the arena where the conflict over the dominance of property rights vs. person rights in government comes to the fore—the conclusion of which cannot always be known in advance—there will be times when State educational policy will be genuinely progressive. Because the State is a site of conflict, compromises or accords will have to be formed that will sometimes signify at least partial victories for progressive or less powerful groups.¹⁴

In essence, historically there often has been something of a trade-off between the meeting of State-sponsored goals and the wishes of groups outside the State itself. Economic, political, and cultural elites will seek a maximum amount of support from other groups for their educational policies “in return for conceding a minimum amount of diversification.”¹⁵ Thus, there will always be pressure from above to gain support for decisions made by government bodies; but such support is very difficult to obtain if State policies do not also incorporate some of the other diverse perspectives both within other elements of elite groups and from those groups with less economic, cultural, and political power. As I noted, the key is to form an accord that acts as an umbrella under which many groups can stand but which basically still is under the guiding principles of dominant groups.

Yet, because of this, the content of curricula and the decision-making process surrounding it cannot simply be the result of an act of domination. The “cultural capital” declared to be official knowledge, then, is compromised knowledge, knowledge that is filtered through a complicated set of political screens and decisions before it gets to be declared legitimate. This affects what knowledge is selected and what the selected knowledge looks like as it is transformed into something that will be taught to students in school. In this way, the State acts as what Basil Bernstein would call a “recontextualizing agent” in the process of symbolic control as it creates accords that enable the creation of “knowledge for everyone.”

This process of transformation, in which knowledge is taken out of its original social or academic context and “recontextualized” and changed by the political rules which govern its new setting, is elaborated on in even greater theoretical detail by Bernstein. Agents such as textbook publishing houses, content consultants, and state and local educational authorities—all those whose task it is to reproduce, not produce, knowledge—together act as recontextualizing agents. The original knowledge from academic disciplines, differing social groups, and so on is appropriated by those groups of people who have power in the new context. The “text,” as Bernstein calls it, “undergoes a transformation prior to its relocation” in the new context. As the text is “de-located” from its original location and “re-located” into the new pedagogic situation, the logic and power relations of the recontextualizing agents ensure that “the text is no longer the same text.”¹⁶ Political accords and educational needs can radically alter the shape and organization of the knowledge.

This occurs in three distinct ways. First, “the text has changed its position in relation to other texts, practices, and positions.” It is no longer part of the professional discourse of researchers or part of the cultural discourse of oppressed groups, for example. This, thereby, alters power relations. In the new context, the knowledge reproducers have more power and the knowledge is integrated into a different set of political and cultural needs and principles. Second, the text itself has been modified by “selection, simplification, condensation, and elaboration.” Thus, for example, dominant pedagogical appro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgments to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction: The Politics of Official Knowledge
• The Politics of Common Sense: Why the Right is Winning
• Cultural Politics and the Text
• Regulating Official Knowledge
• Creating the Captive Audience: Channel One and the Political Economy of the Text
• Whose Curriculum is This Anyway?
• “Hey Man, I'm Good”: The Art and Politics of Creating New Knowledge in Schools
• The Politics of Pedagogy and the Building of Community
• Managerialism, Labor, and Emerging Movements in the Global University
• A Reason for Hope? Changing Minds and the Fate of American Schools
• Appendix: Education, Power, and Personal Biography—an Interview
• Bibliography
• Index