The Long [R]evolution After analyzing both the most important influences on the work and thought of Michael Apple and the general tensions within the curriculum field in order to situate the author´s position in the field, we turn now to the last chapter of this research. As we already pointed out in chapter one, it is our intention in this last part of the research to analyze the work and thought of Michael Apple according to three themes, namely, the question of knowledge, the educational and curriculum concept and, finally, his position towards New Right social policies. This analysis is based on three of his most important works for educational apparatuses and for the curriculum field in particular, namely, Ideology and Curriculum, Official Knowledge, and Democratic Schools although, as we mentioned before, Democratic Schools will be submitted to a slightly different analysis, for we will try to confront it using Dewey’s Schools of To-Morrow and very punctually Experience and Education. Since Michael Apple’s political and pedagogical work is almost countless, one cannot expected that we embrace here in a complete and detailed intertextual analyses envolving all of his material.
Arguably, that task would not fit in a research as such. With this in mind, we will stick with the pieces given above, and when we criticize particular crucial arguments (or absence of crucial arguments) within Michael Apple’s approach, we will point the reader over other Michael Apple’s pieces that might help the reader in the process of understand Michael Apple’s perspective. In order to undertake this analysis, it is necessary to establish briefly the roots to Michael Apple’s intellectual endeavors, or what one should call a long (re)volution. In fact, part of this background was acknowledged in previous chapters where we tried to contextualize both his position within the curriculum field and his closest and more direct influences, what we called Michael Apple’s position within a very specific but complex progressive curricular river.
The first significant influence was Michael Apple’s research in preparation for his dissertation at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was awarded a Doctorate in Education in 1970. It is helpful, therefore, to highlight several paragraphs from this dissertation, which introduce some of the major issues taken up by Michael Apple in his later work. - HERE I STAND: A LONG [R]EVOLUTION: MICHAEL APPLE AND ‘PROGRESSIVE’ CRITICAL STUDIES - 5. 1 The Question of Relevance or one of the Catalysts for a Long (R)evolution In Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge, - according to Huebner 1 , a genial sociological and philosophical treatises - Michael Apple ‘opens the hostilities’, in a viperine and ballistic way [after all, to use Barthes analysis Michael Apple’s pen, sometimes “heats, sometimes excites agreeably and sometimes murders”2] summing up some of the major arguments towards the lack of curriculum relevance.
According to his reading of these major arguments Michael Apple argues that “the schools are brutalizing people [since] they have not met the needs of the people they supposedly serve; [that is to say] schools are not relevant, [t]hey are not personally meaningful.” 3 Based on Spencer’s 4 analysis, for whom “[schools are] killing children [and] robbing their minds”, Michael Apple carried on his reading of schooling, stating that the “cancer” that affects the system is not confined to a specific realm of schools. On the contrary, and drawing from other intellectuals, Michael Apple noted that it is a widespread disease that atrophies the school system in such a way that schools have been characterized “for their limited perspectives and emphasis upon achievement ethic, for their sterility and emphasis upon trivia5, (…) for fostering bad strategies, raising children’s fears, producing learning which is usually fragmentary, distorted and short lived, and generally for failing to meet the real needs of children”6. Moreover, drawing from Goodman, and thus taking a more radical stance, he adds that it is the entire educational system that is at stake since everything “from 1 Huebner, D. (1987) Criticism and Truth.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 3 Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p. (1969) The Struggle for Power in Public Schools.
Teachers College Press, LXX, p., 390, Apud Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. Teachers College Columbia University, p. According to Michael Apple, David Spencer was an educator in an “Intermediate School 201, which would be the equivalent for a Junior High School or Middle School”. This school was built “based on the demands of people for a new school in their neighbourhood [and] it’s built with no windows to the outside, it’s sort of an inner courtyard, and (…) the black community has said, you have now built a school that says you don’t want my kids connected to their local community because there’s no windows for them to look out.
It’s a windowless school and signifies oppression.” Apple, Michael Tape 35, recorded in office “e” of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison. (1968) The Disadvantage: Challenge to education. New York, Harper & Row, Apud Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p.
(1964) How Children Fail. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Apud Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p. 378 - THE LONG [R]EVOLUTION - teaching methods to organization, to curriculum in both content and design, all are irrelevant”7.
As indicated earlier, this points to the understanding that schooling is a space with no personal meaning. Michael Apple further highlights that “the notion of relevance has had a wide currency”8, and even “if it is not widespread, there is at least a highly vocalized belief by many members of the minority groups that schools have failed”9. In other words, schooling has become a merciless task, and one can start to identify in these words the embryonic form of Michael Apple’s argument against the knowledge that has been produced in schools. In fact, according to Michael Apple, the question of relevance became a national educational issue.
However, this national feeling was a complex, multifaceted movement with distinct and varying perspectives on the concept. For major black 10 critics, relevance was a communal relevance “based upon collective identity and aimed social action, often coupled with political argumentation and aided by utopian goals”11. It was connected “to the individual student in terms of building a symbolic community, in terms of social change, as a foundation in the control of their own destinies”12, and for some representatives of the radical sphere, the relevance was “revolutionary in intent and content”13. For the so-called romantic critics, the “the language of relevance is that of an individualistic-oriented child psychology rather than the socio/economic/political and humanistic/philosophical languages of the black critics and [radicals]”14.
As usual, and in a very Deweyan style, Michael Apple refused to take sides. After all, his aim was to build a new critical and radical approach, an approach that, to use Barthes’ words, has “the appearance of a job belonging to public health, which was bravely undertaken”15. Apud Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p.
8 Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p. 10 Michael Apple, in a way, ‘abandons’ this terminology in his later work and use the term ‘African Americans’. We will deal with this particular issue later on.
11 Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Teachers College Columbia University, p. (1987) Criticism and Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.
379 - HERE I STAND: A LONG [R]EVOLUTION: MICHAEL APPLE AND ‘PROGRESSIVE’ CRITICAL STUDIES - After his interpretation of schooling Michael Apple denounced the “highly sloganized” 16 (and quite dangerous, given its simplistic renderings) educational discourse: The literature in filled with articles with suggestions for and discussions about getting students involved and committed by supposedly making school experience more personally meaningful to the students. Professional educators, vitally interested community members, and many others have guaranteed “relevance” a place along with “felt needs”, “life adjustment”, “disciplinary value”, and the list could be extended considerably, as slogans or catch words of eras [are of] special educational concerns17. According to him, although one should not minimize “the concern” that is the basis of the said discourse, the fact is “it mirrors what may be a profound questioning and the beginnings of a more conscious attempt at re-interpreting and re-structuring portions of institutional modes of interaction, with the schools as a primary area of attention”18. Michael Apple’s pen continues to criticize the lack of historical awareness among curriculists and educators in their treatment of the issue of relevance.
For him “our methods for dealing with the problem, our modes of interpretation, and especially our language are, to a large extent, historically determined”19. Thus, and in order to have a full and deep understanding of the idea of relevance one should be aware, not only of the “intellectual history of the curriculum field, and intellectual history that would pay close attention to the influences of societal pressures extant at each period in the course of the discipline’s history of dealing with the concern of personal meaning”20, but also (and this is quite important) the need to understand that “the present curricular situation can only be fully understood when the forces, both intellectual and existential, that have influenced and left deposits upon its form and content are uncovered” 21. Based on 16 Op. 380 - THE LONG [R]EVOLUTION - Manheim’s analysis22, Michael Apple finds that the validity of what is in vogue [or not] in the curriculum mosaic depends on specific social and ideational structures.
It is with this in mind, that Michael Apple foregrounds the urgent need (and one can see explicit Huebner influences here) “to develop and articulate such a coherent and descriptive mode of talking about a major current concern of curriculists and other educators, that of relevance of education”23. In order to do that [and again one can see the way Huebner though had a profound impact on his disciple], we cannot limit our (re)search to the [language of] the education field since “much of the call for relevance must be seen as an integral part in the striving for economic and political integrity and control” 24 , that is to say, “to view [relevance] as totally or perhaps as primarily an education problem would be naïve”25. Furthermore, notwithstanding the fact that we are facing “one of the most widely used words in curricular discourse [in fact, and because of that]; not only it is used, it is over used, so much so that there is a danger that the word may become useful merely ritualistically, as a ceremonial slogan [although slogans can be quite functional], used primarily for its emotive power or for its public relation values”26. Obviously, this is Huebner at his best, and what Michael Apple is saying implicitly is that the language of education is fully polluted, distorted, saturated, and imposes serious limitations and constraints if one wants to deal with the issue of relevance (of knowledge) seriously.
Along with Huebner, Michael Apple highlights that “the limitations of the educational imagination could very well be a consequence of the limitations of the language used to describe present events or phenomena”27. In other words, dealing with such an issue implies, without a doubt, a sort of u-turn approach, [an]other platform of rationality, one that would break with the limited and often inconsequential traditional one that has dominated the field for so long. (1936) Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.
Apud Apple, Michael (1970) Relevance and Curriculum: A Study in Phenomenological Sociology of Knowledge.