Abstract
This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neoconservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. A new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; the lowering of people’s expectations for economic security; the ‘disciplining’ of culture and the body; and the popularization of what is clearly a form of Social Darwinist thinking. In response to this, I detail nine tasks in which the critical scholar/activist should engage in fulfilling the role of the public intellectual. Such tasks are crucial if we are to collectively deal with the current crisis.
Introduction 1
I want to begin this lecture with a personal example of some recent international politics surrounding school reforms. It is an example that illuminates the damaging effects of some of the radically undemocratic policies that are being put in place by conservative governments in all too many countries.
A few years year ago, I spent a semester as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. During my time in Melbourne, I was asked to give a lecture to school principals and teachers in which I was to critically reflect on the policies that were being proposed in education and on how we could make schools more responsive to communities there and elsewhere. After I received the invitation, a number of members of the State Department of Education and Early Childhood Development came to hear me give a more academic address at the university on the politics and effects of neoliberal agendas in education. Within a few days of that university address, my invitation to speak to school leaders was cancelled. ‘My services were no longer required.’ What I had to say was ‘too controversial.’
The context of this decision was the following. The neoliberal government of the state was intent on imposing such policies as performance pay for teachers and principals, increased support for private and religious schools, corporate models of management, anti-union policies, and similar kinds of things. The union of teachers and principals was deeply opposed to these policies, but the government was adamant and unwilling to bargain seriously over them. It had also made it clear that it was not at all pleased to have these issues discussed publicly.
Let us be honest. This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neo conservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. As I point out in a number of recent books, under the influence of those with increasing power in education and in all too much of society what is public is supposedly bad and what is private is supposedly good. Budget cuts have been pushed forward; jobs have been cut; attacks on educators at all levels and on their autonomy and their organisations have gained more visibility; corporate models of competition, accountability, and measurement have been imposed; continual insecurity has become the norm. The loss of respect for the professionalism of educators is striking. These are truly international tendencies, ones found in an entire range of countries (Apple, 2006, 2010, 2013; see also Ball, 2012; Lipman, 2004; Lipman, 2011).
One of the least publicly talked about effects of all of this—although it is constantly on people’s minds—is the possibility of job loss within what has been called ‘the managerial state’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997). This is especially the case for people within the public sector, particularly in areas such as education where state departments of education (not only in Australia but elsewhere as well) are under severe threat of having their positions eliminated. In this situation people avoid controversy at all costs. Issues that possibly challenge dominant policies, and people well known for doing this, are to be kept out of discussions as much as possible.
I can certainly understand the very real worries that the department staff might have had about dealing with controversial issues in a time when their own positions and funding were and still are under threat. However, preventing me from speaking to teachers and administrators about the negative effects of neoliberal policies and about alternatives to them is not only a form of censorship, but it shows disrespect to principals and teachers. Don’t they have the right to publicly consider the crucial issues that affect their lives and the lives of their students and communities, at a time when the policies and pressures being imposed on them are ever more powerful?
What happened over the ensuing month was important, since the government created even more problems than it thought it had solved. There was an immediate sense of outrage on the part of educators and progressive groups. The media publicized the act of censorship and published a number of interviews with me and others condemning the government’s actions. The news stories about the decision to cancel my lecture, and more importantly about the issues that it raised concerning the disrespect the government consistently showed to teachers and school administrators—as well as to poor and working class communities—went viral on Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media. Actions and movements around the issues emerged and grew.
In response, the Australian Education Union organized an even larger audience for what was called ‘The Cancelled Lecture: Understanding and Challenging the Attacks on State Education.’ It was held at exactly the same date and time as the original lecture would have been. The Union also broadcast the lecture to many schools within the state whose distance from Melbourne made it impossible for principals and teachers to attend. In a final act of resistance, many principals and teachers who were to have gone to the conference at which I was to originally speak left the government-sponsored conference and instead came to the Union’s headquarters to hear me. We collectively engaged in a detailed discussion of the politics of education and how to resist the ‘reforms’ that were being imposed on schools and other areas of social policy.
A number of things are clear in this example of the politics of policy at the ground level. Sometimes the decisions by powerful groups to ‘manage consent’ by presenting only the knowledge that
Conservative modernization and the current crisis
I have given a rather personal introduction to this talk to remind us that this is a time when education has become even more of a site of struggle. Certainly, this is very true here in many of the countries represented here at ECER in Budapest. It is a time when we must decide how we are to engage with groups involved in dealing with all of this in critically democratic ways. Dominant groups have attempted, often more than a little successfully, to limit criticism, to control access to research that documents the negative effects of their policies, and to deny the possibility of critically democratic alternatives. They have pressed forward with an agenda that is claimed to simply guarantee efficiency, effectiveness, and cost savings. For them, only these kinds of policies can deal with the crisis in education—even when they are simply wrong.
Dominant groups are not totally wrong in grounding their ‘reforms’ in a sense of crisis. Across the political spectrum, it is widely recognized that there is a crisis in education. Nearly everyone agrees that something must be done to make it more responsive and more effective. Of course, a key set of questions is: Responsive to what and to whom? Effective at what? And whose voices will be heard in asking and answering these questions? These are among the most crucial questions one can ask about education today.
But let us again be honest. The educational crisis is real—especially for the poor and oppressed. Dominant groups have used such ‘crisis talk’ to shift the discussion onto their own terrain.
One of the major reasons for the continuation of dominant discourse and policies is that the very nature of our common sense about education is constantly being altered. This is largely the result of the power of particular groups who understand that if they can change the basic ways we think about our society and its institutions—and especially our place in these institutions—these groups can create a set of policies that will profoundly benefit them more than anyone else. Dominant groups have actively engaged in a vast social/pedagogic process, one in which what counts as a good school, good knowledge, good teaching, a good student, and good learning are being radically transformed.
Let me say more about this process. In a large number of countries, a complex alliance and power bloc has been formed that has increasing influence in education and all things social. This power bloc, what I and Roger Dale have called
In education, this position is grounded in the belief that the more we marketize, the more we bring corporate models into education, the more we can hold schools, administrators, and teachers’ feet to the fire of competition, the better they will be. There actually is very little evidence to support this contention—and a good deal of evidence that it often increases inequality (see Apple, 2006; Lipman, 2004; Lipman, 2011). But neoliberalism continues to act as something like a religion in that it seems to be impervious to empirical evidence, even as the crisis that it has created in the economy and in communities constantly documents its failures in every moment of our collective and individual lives.
The second most powerful group in this alliance is neoconservatives who want a ‘return’ to higher standards and a ‘common culture.’ In the face of diasporic populations who are making the United States, England, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and many other nations a vast and impressive experiment in continual cultural creation, they are committed to a conservative, culturally restorative project, pressing for a return to an imposed sense of nation and tradition that is based on a fear of ‘pollution’ from the culture and the body of those whom they consider the ‘Others.’ That there is a crucial and partly hidden (at least to some people) dynamic of race at work here is not unimportant to say the least (Apple, 2006; Gillborn, 2008; Leonardo, 2009; Lipman, 2011; ). Neoconservatives assume something that is not there, a consensus on what should be ‘official’ knowledge. They thereby try to eliminate one of the most significant questions that should be asked in our schools: What and whose knowledge should we teach? In their certainty over what a common culture is supposed to be, they ignore a key element in this supposed commonness. What is common is that we disagree. Indeed, what needs to be ‘the common’ is the constant democratic and deliberative process of asking the question of what is common (Apple, 2014; Williams, 1989).
A third key element in conservative modernization is composed of authoritarian populist religious conservatives—within already dominant groups—who are deeply worried about secularity and the preservation of their own traditions. They too wish to impose a ‘common.’ For them, ‘the people’ must decide. But there are anointed people and those who are not. Only when a particular reading of very conservative Christianity—or in some countries, repressive forms of Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam—is put back in its rightful place as the guiding project of all of our institutions and interactions, will we be able to once again claim that this is ‘God’s country.’ In the process, they inaccurately construct themselves as the ‘new oppressed,’ as people whose identities and cultures are ignored by or attacked in schools and the media. (Do not misunderstand me. I work with progressive religious activists throughout the world and we need to be immensely respectful of the religious traditions that give meaning to so many millions of people throughout this world. But the use of religion by already dominant groups—a practice that often functions to reproduce Whiteness in the United States, Australia, and many places in Europe—is worrisome.) It is not an accident, for example, that one of the fastest growing educational movements in the United States right now is home schooling (Apple, 2006; Apple and Buras, 2006). Two to three million children have been taken out of public and private or even religious schools, most often for conservative ideological and religious reasons, and are being schooled at home. While the home schooling movement is varied, these decisions are often driven by conservative attacks on public schools and once again by fear of the ‘Other.’
Finally, a crucial part of this ideological umbrella is a particular fraction of the professional and managerial new middle class who occupy positions within the state. This group is made up of people who are committed to the ideology and techniques of accountability, measurement, and the ‘new managerialism,’ to what has been called ‘audit culture’ (Apple, 2006; Clarke and Newman, 1997; Leys, 2003). They too are true believers, ones who believe that in installing such procedures and rules they are ‘helping.’ For them, more evidence on schools’, teachers’, and students’ performance—usually simply based on the limited data generated by test-scores—will solve our problems, even though once again there is just as much evidence that this too can create as many problems as it supposedly solves (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Valenzuela, 2005). Demonstrating that one is ‘acting correctly’ according to externally imposed criteria is the norm. ‘Perform or die’ almost seems to be their religion.
While there are clear tensions and conflicts within this alliance, in general its overall aims are in providing the educational conditions believed necessary both for increasing international competitiveness, profit, and discipline and for returning us to a romanticized past of the ‘ideal’ home, family, and school.
This new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those which guide its economic and social welfare goals. They include the dramatic expansion of that eloquent fiction, the free market; the drastic reduction of government responsibility for social needs; the reinforcement of intensely competitive structures of mobility both inside and outside the school; the lowering of people’s expectations for economic security; the ‘disciplining’ of culture and the body; and the popularization of what is clearly a form of Social Darwinist thinking.
The seemingly contradictory discourse of competition, markets, and choice on the one hand and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national testing, and national curriculum on the other has created a situation in which it is hard to hear anything else. Even though these seem to embody different tendencies, as I demonstrate elsewhere they actually oddly reinforce each other and help cement conservative educational positions into our daily lives (Apple, 2006).
I have given this brief description of this new hegemonic bloc because I want to situate all of my most recent work in the context of current realities. As in the past, education is deeply connected to social movements, contradictions, conflicts, antagonisms, and complicated alliances. Understanding dominance and interrupting its various forms is a crucial part of our work—and it certainly has provided the motivation of all of my own analyses from such early books as
Stressing the social and political in education is not new of course, in England, the United States, Spain, France, Germany, Greece, or elsewhere. Many critical scholars have discussed this at great length internationally. However, under current situations, not only is this fact easy for some of us to forget, but while the act of criticism is important it is not sufficient. Let me say more about this issue and about what it means personally and collectively. In the process, I want to describe a set of responsibilities in which I think critically democratic scholar/activists and public intellectuals in education need to engage in a time of crisis, as the influences of conservative modernization grow.
Questioning the relationship between education and power
As many of you here may already know, over the past four decades I and others have been dealing with a number of ‘simple’ questions. I personally have been deeply concerned about the relationship between culture and power; about the relationship among the economic, political, and cultural spheres (see Apple and Weis, 1983); about the multiple and contradictory dynamics of power and social movements that make education such a site of conflict and struggle; and about what all this means for educational work. Thus, rather than simply asking whether students have mastered a particular subject matter and have done well on our all too common tests, we should ask a different set of questions: Whose knowledge is this? How did it become ‘official’? What is the relationship between this knowledge and how it is organized and taught, and who has cultural, social, and economic capital in this society? Who benefits from these definitions of legitimate knowledge and who does not? What can we do as critical educators and activists to change existing educational and social inequalities and to create curricula and teaching that are more socially just? (see, for example, Apple, 1996, 1999, 2004, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014; Apple and Beane, 2007). These are crucial questions. And as I showed in the distressing example of what happened in Australia, the Right has been very effective in placing strong limits on our ability to make public more critically democratic answers to these questions.
The tasks of the critical scholar/activist
Given what I have said about the current situation, I want now to speak to possibilities and to what we might do to interrupt dominance. For many people, including many colleagues who are present in this room, their original impulses toward critical theoretical, political, and practical work in education were fueled by a passion for social justice, economic equality, human rights, sustainable environments, an education that is worthy of its name—in short a better world. Yet, as I have shown, this is increasingly difficult to maintain in the situation in which so many of us find ourselves. Ideologically and politically much has changed. The early years of the 21st century have brought us unfettered capitalism, which fuels market tyrannies and massive inequalities on a truly global scale (Davis, 2006). ‘Democracy’ is resurgent at the same time, but as I and others have also shown in a large number of analyses, it all too often becomes a thin veil for the interests of the globally and locally powerful and for disenfranchisement, mendacity, and national and international violence (Apple, 2010; Burawoy, 2005: 260;). The rhetoric of freedom and equality may have intensified, but there is unassailable evidence that there is ever deepening exploitation, domination, and inequality and that earlier gains in education, economic security, civil rights, and more are either being washed away or are under severe threat. The religion of the market (and as I said earlier, it does function like a religion, since it does not seem to be amenable to empirical critiques) is coupled with very different visions of what the state can and should do.
At the same time, in the social field of power called the academy–—with its own hierarchies and disciplinary (and disciplining) techniques, the pursuit of academic credentials, bureaucratic regimes and national and international rankings, performance criteria, indeed the entire panoply of normalizing pressures surrounding institutions and careers—all of this seeks to ensure that we all think and act ‘correctly.’ Yet, the original impulse is never entirely vanquished (Burawoy, 2005). The spirit that animates critical work can never be totally subjected to rationalizing logics and processes. Try as the powerful might, it will not be extinguished—and it certainly remains alive in a good deal of the important work that is done by critical research represented in this conference. People here and elsewhere have constantly struggled to act as the ethical consciences of nations.
What can we learn from my colleagues here and in other places about our role as public intellectuals, or as I call them in …works in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local, and often counter-public. [She or he works] with a labor movement, neighborhood association, communities of faith, immigrant rights groups, human rights organizations. Between the public sociologist and a public is a dialogue, a process of mutual education… The project of such [organic] public sociologies is to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life. (Burawoy, 2005: 265)
This act of becoming (and this is a
In general, there are nine tasks in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education must engage (Apple, 2010, 2013). And they have guided my work for my entire career.
It must ‘bear witness to negativity.’
2
That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational policy and practice are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination—and to struggles against such relations—in the larger society.
3
This is significant since dominant groups often live in what might best be called an
In engaging in such critical analyses, it is vital that such critical analyses also point to contradictions and to
At times, critical analysis also requires a broadening of what counts as ‘research.’ Here I mean acting as critical ‘secretaries’ to those groups of people, communities, and social movements who are now engaged in challenging existing relations of unequal power, or in what elsewhere has been called ‘nonreformist reforms,’ a term that has a long history in critical sociology and critical educational studies (Apple, 2012). This is exactly the task that was taken on in the thick descriptions of critically democratic school practices in
When Gramsci (1971) argued that one of the tasks of a truly counter-hegemonic education and committed cultural workers was not to throw out ‘elite knowledge’ but to reconstruct its form and content so that it served genuinely progressive social needs, he provided a key to another role ‘organic’ and ‘public’ intellectuals might play. Thus, we should not be engaged in a process of what might be called ‘“intellectual suicide.’ That is, there are serious intellectual (and pedagogic) skills in dealing with the histories and debates surrounding the epistemological, political, and educational issues involved in justifying what counts as important knowledge and what counts as an effective and socially just education. These are not simple and inconsequential issues and the practical and intellectual/political skills of dealing with them have been well developed. However, these skills can atrophy if they are not used. We can give back these skills by employing them to assist communities in thinking about this, learning from them, and engaging in the mutually pedagogic dialogues that enable decisions to be made in terms of both the short-term and long-term interests of dispossessed peoples (see Apple et al., 2009; Borg and Mayo, 2007; Burawoy, 2005; Freire, 1970).
In the process, critical work has the task of keeping traditions of radical and progressive work alive. Organized attacks on the ‘collective memories’ of difference and critical social movements make it increasingly difficult to retain academic and social legitimacy for the multiple critical approaches that have proven so valuable in countering dominant narratives and relations, In the face of such attacks it is absolutely crucial that these traditions be kept alive, renewed, and when necessary criticized for their conceptual, empirical, historical, and political silences or limitations. This involves being cautious of reductionism and essentialism and asks us to pay attention to what Fraser has called both the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition (Fraser, 1997; see also Anyon et al., 2009 and Apple, 2013). This includes not only keeping alive theoretical, empirical, historical, and political traditions—and the educational policies and practices generated out of them; but, very importantly, it involves extending and (supportively) criticizing them. And it also involves keeping alive the dreams, utopian visions, and ‘non-reformist reforms’ that are so much a part of these radical traditions (Apple et al., 2009; Apple et al., 2010; Apple, 2012; Jacoby, 2005; Teitelbaum, 1993). Purity should not be our goal nor should the search for one answer. Rather the constant rich debate and growth of multiple critical traditions in constant conversation with each other is what is necessary.
Keeping such traditions alive and also supportively criticizing them when they are not adequate to deal with current realities cannot be done unless we ask ‘For whom are we keeping them alive?’ and ‘How and in what form are they to be made available?’ All of the things I have mentioned above in this taxonomy of tasks require the relearning or development and use of varied or new skills of working at many levels with multiple groups. Thus, journalistic and media skills, academic and popular skills, and the ability to speak to very different audiences are increasingly crucial (Apple, 2006; Boler, 2008). This requires us to learn how to speak in different registers and to say important things in ways that do not require that the audience or reader do all of the work. The Right has been very good at doing this. We too must relearn these skills.
Critical educators must also
Building on the points made in the previous paragraph, the critical scholar/activist has another role to play. She or he needs to act as a deeply committed mentor, as someone who demonstrates through her or his life what it means to be
Finally, participation also means using the privilege one has as a scholar/activist. That is, each of us needs to make use of our privilege to open the spaces at universities and elsewhere for those who are not there, for those who do not now have a voice in that space and in the ‘professional’ sites to which, being in a privileged position, we have access. This can be seen, for example, in the history of the ‘activist-in-residence’ program at the University of Wisconsin Havens Center for Social Justice, where committed activists in various areas (the environment, indigenous and immigrant rights, gender, housing, labor, racial disparities, education, and so on) were brought in to teach and to connect our academic work with organized action against dominant relations. Or it can be seen in a number of Women’s Studies programs and Indigenous, Aboriginal, and First Nation Studies programs that historically have involved activists in these communities as active participants in the governance and educational programs of these areas at universities.
Conclusion
These nine tasks, discussed above, are demanding; and though we may try, no one person can engage equally well in all of them simultaneously. What we can do is honestly continue our attempt to come to grips with the complex intellectual, personal, political, and practical tensions and activities that are the results of the demands of this role. And this requires a searching critical examination of one’s own structural location, one’s own overt and tacit political commitments, and one’s own embodied actions once this recognition, in all its complexities and contradictions, is taken as seriously as it deserves.
Yet, if we look around the world, there are individuals, researchers, institutes, coalitions, unions, and social movements that have played and continue to play such a large part in the continuing struggle to build an education that is truly critically democratic in nations and ‘nations to be.’ Can we do less?
Let us be honest, however. As my introductory example on the attempts to silence me and others demonstrates, dominant groups often prefer the epistemological fog. And they will not stand idly by when we individually and collectively act to speak back. But as that example also shows, they cannot totally control the terrain on which such acts occur. Nor can they totally control its outcome. Spaces for counter-hegemonic work are constantly being created at the very same moment as dominant groups seek to close other spaces. Recognizing and filling these spaces is as crucial as it has ever been. Indeed, some of the very best examples of this can be found in so many of the nations and regions represented in this conference.
As I demonstrate in much more detail in
Let me conclude by being honest about something else. As someone who grew up very poor, I always try to remember the debts I owe to the sacrifices made by many other people. All of us stand on the shoulders of many others who have taken such issues seriously and on the shoulders of those people whose seen and unseen labor provides the spaces for our work. If we think of
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.