Can Education Change Society?

Michael W. Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136185830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Despite the vast differences between the Right and the Left over the role of education in the production of inequality one common element both sides share is a sense that education can and should do something about society, to either restore what is being lost or radically alter what is there now. The question was perhaps put most succinctly by the radical educator George Counts in 1932 when he asked "Dare the School Build a New Social Order?", challenging entire generations of educators to participate in, actually to lead, the reconstruction of society. Over 70 years later, celebrated educator, author and activist Michael Apple revisits Counts' now iconic works, compares them to the equally powerful voices of minoritized people, and again asks the seemingly simply question of whether education truly has the power to change society.

In this groundbreaking work, Apple pushes educators toward a more substantial understanding of what schools do and what we can do to challenge the relations of dominance and subordination in the larger society. This touchstone volume is both provocative and honest about the ideological and economic conditions that groups in society are facing and is certain to become another classic in the canon of Apple's work and the literature on education more generally.

1

CAN EDUCATION
CHANGE SOCIETY?

First Thoughts

Crisis talk is often over-used in books that seek to deal with issues of crucial public importance. But this is a time when such talk seems almost understated. All around us the effects of such things as unemployment, growing economic inequalities, housing foreclosures, the defunding of programs for the poor, hunger, homelessness, loss of pensions and health care, resurgent racism, anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, and so much more are becoming ever more visible. In schools, the achievement gap, the school to prison pipeline, the attacks on serious critical multicultural content, the cuts in school funding, the utter disrespect shown in policy and the media toward teachers, and again the list could be extended as far as the eye can see—all of this is painfully evident. For those of us deeply committed to an education worthy of its name, the crisis is palpable. It forces us to ask whether education has a substantive role to play in challenging this situation and in assisting in building a society that reflects our less selfish and more socially and personally emancipatory values. The book you are about to read wants to take this issue seriously.

Can Education Change Society? is a somewhat different kind of book than others I have written. I did not want to write a largely theoretical book. After all, I’d already spent a good deal of time in various books and articles analyzing whether education had some independent power or was totally determined by dominant economic and cultural relations (see, e.g., Apple 1982; Apple 1986; Apple 1996; Apple 2002; Apple 2004; Apple 2010; Apple 2012). I had also partly answered this question by showing in greater detail the ways in which rightist movements had employed education as part of a larger radical reconstruction of the priorities of this society (Apple 2006). There is still some serious theoretical work with which this book engages, especially later on in this introductory chapter and in Chapter 2. (Be patient. This work is important grounding for my chapters on critical people and programs in the rest of the volume.) But the aim is not to advance and justify a new over-arching argument. Nor is it to give us the one ultimate answer to the question of whether education can change society. Indeed, it became clear to me while writing the chapters in this book, that there is no one ultimate answer—unless we can be satisfied with something such as this: “It depends. And it depends on a lot of hard and continued efforts by many people.” This may be frustrating for you and certainly for me. But it is honest.

Instead, this is a book of critical reflections and examples. The first chapters include reflections on the work of some of the most significant people who historically sought to answer the question. I focus on a number of public intellectuals from both dominant and minoritized communities and endeavor to show how their work bears on the question and on the responsibilities of the critical educator. The second set of chapters gives two examples of successful attempts to use education in movements involved in larger social transformations. One of these examples is deeply progressive both in its goals and in its process. The second is decidedly not progressive in either its goals or its process. But it was and is a powerful reminder that those who answer the question of whether education can change society—or at least play a key role in pushing society in particular directions—may not be committed to a society based on principles and practices that many readers of this book would find to their liking.

The first example details what has happened in a place from which anyone who wants to further democratize society and its key institutions has much to learn about lasting reform—the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The second example brings us back to the United States. Here, a massive multi-national corporation—in this case Wal-Mart—has worked in coordination with allies among powerful conservative economic, cultural, religious, and political movements. It has shown over time how effective an educational strategy can be in pushing forward and legitimating a very different and very limited conception of democracy. This is at the very opposite end of the ideological spectrum from that of the critically democratic successes in Porto Alegre.

While my reflections on public intellectuals include people from both inside and outside of the United States (Paulo Freire for the latter and George S. Counts, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Carter G. Woodson for the former) and my examples are taken from both Brazil and the United States, I cannot pretend to speak for all nations and all times. The reader needs to do what she or he always does—ask whether the reflections, examples, and arguments I offer here fit your reality and your society. Context counts and it counts even more when we think critically about education.

In the end then, this is a more personal book than many of my others. It is personal in a number of ways. The volume is grounded in my attempt to come to grips with answering a truly tough question and perhaps in my frustration over not being able to provide a simple answer to whether education can change society. It is also personal in that it details and analyzes people and examples that I find especially useful in both asking and answering the question in better ways. It also is situated in a particular personal journey over a conceptual and political terrain that involves my search for a more inclusive understanding of what issues count as important parts of the continuing struggles for social justice and a more responsive and respectful society. Some of this journey will be evident in this introductory chapter. Finally, it is personal in that one of the later chapters includes an account of my own public actions that got me “in trouble,” but ultimately served to change me and the institutions and students with whom I work.

With this said, let’s begin.

Coming Home

As I write these words, I have just returned to Wisconsin from Argentina where I had immensely productive discussions and gave lectures to supporters of critical social transformations and to teacher union activists. In some ways, my experiences there were like living in another world. SUTEBA, and other educational unions had clear affiliations with larger labor initiatives. They had just won well-deserved gains from the national government. The enthusiasm for and commitment to the rights of teachers and other educators at all levels of the educational system were visible and quite high. Teachers, and labor as a whole, had a strong voice in educational policy. Unemployed workers were being organized and there were both social and educational programs that treated them with the respect that they deserved. Education and financial and ideological support for it were seen as core parts of a progressive agenda for continued social and cultural transformation, with the percent of GDP going to education much higher than that found in supposedly “more advanced” nations such as the United States.

I don’t want to romanticize the political and educational situation in Argentina. There are major conflicts over its means and ends there and serious ideological differences that often map on to the right versus left divide. There are also neo-liberal and neoconservative attacks on schools, curricula, teachers, unions, and the current government’s policies in every sphere of society. While it is clear that a number of these policies often do not go far enough in progressive directions, they clearly do move in generally progressive directions. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top don’t seem to be able to encompass what is happening there, thank goodness. It was bracing and refreshing.

When compared to the concerted, well-orchestrated, and well-funded conservative attacks on teachers and all public employees, on unions, on schools and the curricula, on the rights of minoritized people, on voting rights, on government responsibility for nearly any of the hard-fought collective rights that have been won by the majority of people in Wisconsin and the rest of the United States, the prevailing discourse and policies in Argentina constantly reminded me of how far we have moved in right-wing directions in the places where I live. The right to collectively bargain has been immensely weakened. Education is seen as simply factories producing test scores and docile workers. Teachers and all public workers are treated as unworthy of serious respect. Affordable health care and pensions are under threat. Women are losing control of their bodies. Environmental protections are being taken away. Economic inequalities are at their highest rates in decades and are widening even further. And the rates of incarceration among people of color are a national disgrace. All of this is coupled with cynical legislation to depress voting among the poor, the elderly, people of color, anyone who might vote for those “bad” policies that ask people to show compassion and respect for those many, many real people left behind in a society that seems to have lost its ethical way.

What is it about our nation and not a few others that a fully funded and fully public education and the people who work in it are demonized? Why has schooling been singled out, when it’s clear that the economic and political crises we are experiencing did not start there? Why focus on schools and public employees when the financial sector and dominant economic elites seems to get off with hardly a slap on the wrist? Why engage in a “race to the bottom” by attacking the gains made by some workers, when we should instead be focusing on why so many other workers are losing the pensions and health care that they deserve? These are of course complicated questions, some of which I have tried to answer elsewhere (Apple 2006). But one thing is ever more clear. Schools are seen in a very contradictory way. They are seen to be key elements of the causes of our problems. Thus radically changing them (through an odd combination of privatization and competition and stronger central control) is imperative. “Good” schools are those and only those that hew to a corporate agenda and a corporate image. “Bad” schools are all the rest. And the people who work in them need a good dose of competition and tighter control. But through it all, what is evident is the loss of commitment to collective responsibility. It’s almost as if schooling itself as a collective process is an enemy, a source of pollution that threatens the purity of market solutions and possessive individualism.

Yet, in the face of this onslaught of attacks, many of us can bear witness to alternative narratives, to an abiding faith that an education that is not only about a business agenda and one that is not turned into a business itself can make a real difference in people’s lives. Let me give a particularly telling and poignant example of a people’s recognition of the crucial place that schools hold in keeping alive the hopes and dreams that nourish one’s very being. But in telling this poignant story, I also want to immediately compare it to another example, one in which schools are indeed used for social transformation—but in directions that are more than a little damaging to the least advantaged members of a community.

Changing Schools, Changing Markets

During the war in the former Yugoslavia, I spent time in refugee camps in what is now Slovenia. Thousands upon thousands of people fled over the mountains to escape the murderous and merciless shelling of Sarajevo. When the people crossed the border into Slovenia and reached the refugee camps—really only decaying army barracks that were the only home they would know for months—they immediately organized two things: food distribution and schools. Both were seen as absolutely essential for them and for their children.

For those of us who want to raise the key question that is signified by the title of this book, “Can education change society?,” the actions that these refugees immediately took to create a school demonstrate in no uncertain terms that for them there could be no respectful society without a functioning and democratized education system for their children. We either have to say that they were possessed by some mystical consciousness and didn’t have a clue about what was happening to them or we have to admit that their very identities and their hopes for a better future were intimately tied up with a deep respect and concern for an education that was closely connected to a vision of a society that provided solace and hope in a time of tragedy. Education wasn’t merely about jobs; it was about one’s very being. Whether the refugees were secular or religious, schooling—and education in general—was a central part of their very identities. Oppressed people may realize simple facts much more readily than those who take certain things for granted much more easily. It is not “just” refugees who feel this way.

I use the word “refugee” with great hesitancy, for words like refugee can do damage to reality and to one’s humanity. These were people who were forced out by state-sanctioned murder, by official policy. They were people who cannot be adequately described by that one word—refugee. These were teachers, builders, nurses, shop owners, store clerks, farmers, children, fathers, mothers, grandparents. The concept of refugee is too anonymous and can act as part of a larger process of dehumanization. And there is more linguistic politics at work here. The conflict that led to the murders and the fleeing—the “ethnic cleansing”—is itself “cleansed” and made more acceptable by describing it by that incredible oxymoron “civil war.”

We do not have to look outside our borders for such cleansing. Think about what happened—and continues to happen—in that great city of the United States known as New Orleans. That experience is also cleansed. The story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is described as a “natural disaster.” Words such as natural disaster are ways in which dominant groups dismiss their own culpability in the creation of situations such as these (Apple 2000). It is all too painfully obvious that there was very little about what happened that was natural. It was the result of decades of neglect, economic attacks, racializing policies, and a regime at all levels that saw in this socially created disaster an opportunity to transform New Orleans through the application of the religion of the market (see Buras, et al. 2010).

I say religion here, because neoliberalism—a vision that sees every sector of society as subject to the logics of commodification, marketization, competition, and cost–benefit analysis—seems to be immune to empirical arguments, especially, but not only, in education. As I demonstrate in Educating the “Right” Way (Apple 2006), in very few nations of the world has setting the market loose on schools and other social institutions consistently led to greater equality.

The religious status of neoliberalism assumes particular things. Choice, competition, markets—all of these supposedly will lead us to the promised land of efficient and effective schools. And such schools will play major roles in transforming the public into the private. In the process, this will lead to a rosy economy as we “regain our competitive edge in the global marketplace.” The key word here is “supposedly.” This is a crucial caveat, since we know that school choice policies, especially those involving marketization and privatization, often involve schools choosing students and parents as much as parents choosing schools (Apple 2006). In New Orleans, it is obvious that it also involves destroying existing schools and shedding the teachers who worked in them. Anything that existed before is “bad”; everything that replaces it is “good.” It is not to romanticize the realities of schools as they were before Katrina and its aftermath, to recognize the fact that these schools and these teachers had long histories, with many victories associated with them. These schools and these people carried with them the collective memories of struggles. They provided a living, breathing history of oppressed peoples’ never-ending collective attempts to create and defend institutions that speak to their and their children’s realities, histories, cultures, and dreams.¹ In contexts such as this, “choice” functions as the partial destruction of collective memory (Buras, et al. 2010; Buras 2011).

But this institutional destruction and the shedding of teachers so that everyone is more efficient and effective is not all. We also know that such policies on the ground do not work as smoothly as market proponents assume in their utopian dreams about efficiencies and accountability. Indeed, as I noted, it has become clear both nationally and internationally that markets can indeed not only reproduce existing inequalities but that they can and often do create even more inequalities than existed previously. When they are combined with an increased emphasis on national and state testing—which usually accompanies such proposals in a considerable number of nations—the results from this combination of neo-liberal market initiatives and neoconservative pressure to standardize and impose a supposedly common culture and also to mandate reductive accountability measures can be truly damaging to the most oppressed people (see Apple 2006; Buras 2008; see also Ravitch 2010; Valenzuela 2005). Schools then will participate in social transformation, but not in ways many identifiable people will find to their benefit. Transformations then can and do go backward, not only forward.

The class and race specificities of these tendencies are increasingly visible. There is an emerging body of international research that documents how middle-class parents are able to use choice plans for their own advantage (Ball 2003; Lauder and Hughes 1999; Power, Edwards, Whitty, and Wigfall 2003). This should not surprise us. As Bourdieu has elegantly demonstrated, middle-class and more affluent actors have a “natural” habitus that makes them considerably more able to employ strategies that enable them to play the market game. Their store of cultural, economic, and social capital privileges them in the complicated conversion strategies surrounding choice (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1984). Similar racializing effects are all too visible as well, as choice programs foster a set of strategies in which dominant groups are able to protect their children and themselves from the body and culture of the “polluting Other” (Apple 2006; Gillborn 2008; Lauder and Hughes 1999; Lipman 2011).

But of course this is the point isn’t it? Making New Orleans a nice “safe” city for the middle class and “whitening” it so that the city becomes even more of a theme park for tourists with money, becomes one more instance in a long history of the relationship between markets and their vision of rational individual choice and race (Mills 1997).² In saying this, I want to be careful, however. The language of the free market and choice is partly counter-hegemonic. In a time when the common stereotypes that circulate so widely in the media and in white common sense picture African Americans, Latino/as, and many other people of color as dangerous and irrational, the vision of the rational individual consumer embodied in the ideology of the market offers a different identity to oppressed people than the pathological ones seemingly so easily accepted among those in society who view themselves as the norm, as the “human ordinary” (Apple and Pedroni 2005; Pedroni 2007). However, in the long run, as has happened to people of color in other countries the gains associated with this partly counter-hegemonic identity can be easily washed away and may be more than a little temporary (Lauder and Hughes 1999).

New Orleans is not alone here. As Pauline Lipman cogently demonstrates, in cities such as Chicago similar “reforms” have come to dominate the discourse and policies in education. And similar racializing assumptions and effects both stand behind and are reproduced by them (Lipman 2004; Lipman 2011). We should never underestimate the ways in which racial dynamics...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Can Education Change Society?
• 2 Paulo Freire and the Tasks of the Critical Scholar/Activist in Education
• 3 George Counts and the Politics of Radical Change
• 4 Du Bois, Woodson, and the Politics of Transformation
• 5 Keeping Transformations Alive: Learning From the “South” Luis Armando Gandin and Michael W.Apple
• 6 Wal-Marting America: Social Change and Educational Action
• 7 Critical Education, Speaking the Truth, and Acting Back
• 8 Answering the Question: Education and Social Transformation
• Notes
• References
• Index