Ideology, Reproduction, and Educational Reform

Abstract

Liberal educators have taken a rather optimistic posture on some aspects of the past 10-15 years of educational reform in the United States. This is particularly evident, perhaps, in those individuals and groups who are concerned primarily with curriculum, with the knowledge that gets into schools, and who have either witnessed or participated in the growth of discipline-centered curricula throughout the country. The position is often taken that school people, scholars, the business community, parents, and others, all somehow working together, have set in motion forces that have increased the stock of disciplinary knowledge that all students are to get. Supposedly, this process of increased distribution of knowledge has been enhanced by comparatively large amounts of funding on a national level for curriculum development, teacher training and retraining, and so on. Success may not have been total-after all, it almost never is-but better management and dissemination strategies can be generated to deal with these kinds of problems. Given this posture, we have tended to forget that, often, what is not asked about such widespread efforts at "reform" may be more important than what we commonsensically like to ask. Who benefits from such reforms? What are their latent connections to the ways inequality may be maintained? Do the very ways we tend to look at schools and especially the knowledge and culture they overtly and covertly teach (even ways generated out of a fairly radical perspective) cover some of the interests that they embody? What frameworks have been and need to be developed to generate the evidence which answers to these kinds of questions require? In what follows, I shall outline some approaches for dealing with these issues, approaches which incorporate some of the current economic criticisms of schooling but which also respond to the complex functioning of schools that even some of the analysts of the political economy of education may tend to gloss over. Only when we can see this complex functioning, some of which embodies clear economic The analysis on which this article is based is expanded in Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, in press). @ 1978 by the Comparative and International Education Society. 0010-4086/78/2203-0001$01.72