Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum. 2nd ed. (1990) [out of print]

Chapter 2

Ideology and cultural and economic reproduction

Cultural and econonic reproduction

Many economists and not a few sociologists and historians of education have a peculiar way of looking at schools. They envision the institution of schooling as something like a black box. One measures input before students enter schools and then measures output along the way or when 'adults' enter the labor force. What actually goes on within the black box&emdash;what is taught, the concrete experience of children and teachers &emdash; is less important in this view than the more global and macro-economic considerations of rate of retum on investment, or, more radically, the reproduction of the division of labor. While these are im-portant considerations, perhaps especially that dealing, as I noted in Chapter 1, with the role of the school as a reproductive force in an unequal society, by the very nature of a vision of school as a black box, they cannot demonstrate how these effects are built within schools. Therefore, these individuals are less precise than they could be in ex-plaining part of the role of cultural institutions in the teproduction they want to describe. Yet, as I shall argue here, such cultural explana-tions need to be got at; but it requires a different but often complemen-tary orientation than the ones these and other scholars employ.

There is a unique combination of elite and popular culture in schools. As institutions they provide excep~tionally interesting, and politically and economically potent, areas for the investigation of mechanisms of cultural distribution in a society. Thinking of schools as mechanisms of cultural distribution is important since, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci noted, a critical element in enhancing the ideological dominance of certain classes is the control of the knowledge preserving and producing institutions of a particular society. Thus, the

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'reality' that schools and other cultural institutions select, preserve and distribute may need to be particularized, in Mannheim's words, so that it can be seen as a particular 'social construction' which may not serve the interests of every individual and group in society.

Now it has become something of a commonplace in recent socio-logical and educational literature to speak of reality as a social construc-tion. By this, these scholars, especially those of a phenomenological bent, mean two things. (1) Becoming a person is a social act, a process of initiation in which the neophyte accepts a particular social reality as reality tout court, as the way life 'really is.' (2) On a larger scale, the social meanings which sustain and organize a collectivity are created by the continuing pattems of commonsense interaction of people as they go about their lives.3 Now this insertion of the social element back into what has increasingly become a psychological problem in Anglo-Westem society is certainly an improvement over the view of many educators who hold that the pattems of meanings which people use to organize their lives and attempt to transmit through their cultural insti-tutions are independent of social or ideological influences. The notion that there is a 'social construction of reality' is a bit too general, however, and not as helpful as we might think in understanding the relationships that exist between cultural institutions, particularly schools, and the framework and texture of social and economic forms in general. As Whitty succinctly puts it,4

The overemphasis on the notion that reality is socially constructed seems to have led to a neglect of the consideration of how and why reality comes to be constructed in particular ways and how and why particular constructions of reality seem to have the power to resist subversion.

Thus, the general principle of the social construction of reality does not explain why certain social and cultural meanings and not others are dis-tributed through schools; nor does it explain how the control of the knowledge preserving and producing institutions may be linked to the ideological dominance of powerful groups in a social collectivity. The opposite principle, that knowledge is not related in any signi-ficant way to the organization and control of social and economic life is also problematic, of course, though this may be a surprise to many curriculum theorists. This is best stated by Raymond Williams in his critical analysis of the social distribution of culture.5

The pattern of meanings and values through which people conduct their whole lives can be seen for a time as autonomous, and as evolv-ing within its own terms, but it is quite unreal, ultimately, to

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separate this pattern from a precise political and economic system, which can extend its influence into the most unexpected regions of feeling and behavior. The common prescription of education, as the key to change, ignores the fact that the form and content of educa-tion are affected, and in some cases determined, by the actual systems of [political] decision and [economic] maintenance.

Both Whitty and Williams are raising quite difficult issues about what might be called the relationship between ideology and school knowledge, yet the context is generally British. It should not surprise us that there is a rather extensive history of dealing with issues concern-ing the connections between culture and control on the Continent and in England. For one thing, they have had a less hidden set of class antagonisms than the USA. That the tradition of ideological analysis is less visible in American educational and cultural scholarship speaks to two other concerns though, the ahistorical nature of most educational activity and the dominance of an ethic of amelioration through technical models in most curriculum discourse.6 The ahistorical nature of the field of curriculum is rather interesting here. Anyone familiar with the intense argumentation both within and on the fringes of the Progressive Education Association during its history soon realizes that one of the major points of contention among progressive educators was the problem of indoctrination. Should schools, guided by a vision of a more just society, teach a particular set of social meanings to their students? Should they concem themselves only with progressive pedagogical techniques, rather than espouse a particular social and economic cause? Questions of this type 'plauged' democratically minded educators in the past and the controversy continues, though in a different vocabulary, to this day.

In fact, as Stanwood Cobb, one of the early organizers of the Progressive Education Association, has stated, many progressive educa-tors throughout the early decades of this century were quite cautious about even raising the question of what actual content should be taught and evaluated in schools. They often preferred to concern themselves primarily with teaching methods, in part because the determination of curriculum was perceived as inherently a political issue which could split the movement.7 Cobb's estimation of the larger structural causes behind these educators' choice of arenas in which to act may or may not be historically accurate. The fact remains though that, at least phenomenologically, many educators recognized that the culture pre-served and distributed by schools as well as other institutions was not necessarily neutral. They perceived their own actions as often stemming from that recognition. Unfortunately, as I noted, these recurring historically significant issues have not informed current curriculum

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argumentation in the United States as much as they have in, say, England and France. Yet, as we also saw, there is a growing recognition that schools in advanced industrial societies like our own may serve certain social classes rather well and other classes not well at all. Thus, I can think of few areas of investigation more pressing than that which seeks to uncover the linkages between meaning and control in our cul-tural institutions.

While I cannot present a fully worked out theory of culture and con-trol at this time (though individuals such as Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and Basil Bernstein have begun such a task),8 I would like to do a number of things here. First, I want to provide a deeper discussion of the basic framework of assumptions under which the recent work on the relationship between ideology and school experience operates. This will be compared to the traditions which now predominate in curricu-lum research today. I will, then, take one aspect of the argument about the linkages between curriculum and ideological and economic structure and will outline some general propositions about it. These propositions should be seen more as hypotheses than as final proof, and will undoubtedly require historical, conceptual, and empirical&emdash; to say nothing of comparative&emdash;investigations to demonstrate their fruitfulness. These hypotheses will concern the relationship between what curricular knowledge is accorded high status in our society and its economic and cultural effects. I shall argue that it is difficult to think through the past and present problems of the form and content of curriculum without attempting to uncover the complex nexus linking cultural and economic reproduction together. Let us begin by briefly examining the extant traditions&emdash;as ideal types&emdash;that tend to provide the assumptive background of a good deal of current curriculum work.

The achievement and socialization traditions

A large proportion of educational and curriculum theories and scholar-ship today derive their programmatic impetus and their logical warrant from the various psychologies of learning now available. While Schwab and others have demonstrated that it is a logical error to attempt to derive a theory of curriculum (or pedagogy) from a theory of learning9 - something all too many curriculum theorists still do not seem to realize&emdash;there is another difficulty that is more germane to my own discussion here. As I shall demonstrate more fully later, the language of learning tends to be apolitical and ahistorical, thus hiding the complex nexus of political and economic power and resources that lies behind a considerable amount of curriculum organization and selection. In brief, it is not an adequate linguistic tool for dealing with what must be

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a prior set of curriculum questions about some of the possible ideo-logical roots of school knowledge. In their simplest aspects, these questions can be reduced to the following issues: 'What is actually taught in schools?' 'What are the manifest and latent social functions of the knowledge that is taught in schools?' 'How do the principles of selection and organization that are used to plan, order, and evaluate that knowledge function in the cultural and economic reproduction of class relations in an advanced industrial society like our own?"10 These questions are not usually part of the language game of psychology. Let us examine the conceptual framework, the board, on which language games of this type are played just a bit further.

There seem to have been two rather distinct ways educators (and psychologists, sociologists, and economists) have investigated school knowledge. One has centered around the issue of academic achievement. The second has been less concerned with questions of achieve-ment than with the role of schools as socialization mechanisms.11

In the academic achievement model, curricular knowledge itself is not made problematic. Rather the knowledge that finds its way into schools is usually accepted as given, as neutral, so that comparisons can be made among social groups, schools, children, etc. Thus, academic performance, differentiation, and stratif~cation based on rela-tively unexamined presuppositions of what is to be construed as valuable knowledge are the guiding interests behind the research. The focus tends to be on determining the variables that have a major impact on an individual's or group's success or failure in school, such as the 'adolescent subculture,' the unequal distribution of educational resources, or say, the social background of the students. The social goal is maximizing academic productivity.

Unlike the academic achievement model, the socialization approach does not necessarily leave school knowledge unexamined. In fact, one of its primary interests is in exploring the social norms and values that are taught in school. However, because of this interest, it restricts itself to the study of what might be called'moral knowledge.'It estab-lishes as given the set of societal values and inquires into how the school as an agent of society socializes students into its 'shared'set of norma-tive rules and dispositions. Robert Dreeben's well-known little book, On What Is Learned in Schools,l2 can provide an excellent example here.

These approaches are not totally wrong, of course, and have in the past contributed to our understanding of schools as cultural and social mechanisms, though perhaps not always in the way the approaches intended. In fact, one advantage of the extended accounts of, say, socialization by Dreeben and others is that they enhance our ability to illuminate what is taken for granted as common sense, as given, for

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such an approach to actually be accepted as a cogent explanation at all.13 As such, they point beyond themselves to the nature of meaning and control in schools. What they tacitly accept and, hence, fail to question is important for, on closer inspection, each of these two re-search traditions is problematic in its own way. The academic achieve-ment model, influenced more and more strongly by managerial concerns of technical control and efficiency, has begun to neglect the actual content of the knowledge itself, thus failing to take seriously the possible connection between economics and the structure of school knowledge other than to argue, say, the importance of the 'production' of students with strong disciplinary affiliations if 'democracy is to be kept strong,' and so on. The socialization tradition, while insightful in its own way, focuses on social consensus and on the parallels that exist between the 'given' values of a larger collectivity and educational in-stitutions. It, thus, ignores to a very large extent the political and economic context in which such social values function and by which certain sets of social values become the (by whose definition?) dominant values.14 Furthermore, both almost totally disregard some of the latent functions of the form and content of the school curriculum. And this is exactly what the tradition of what has come to be called the 'sociology of school knowledge' wants to inquire into.ts

The sociology and economics of school knowledge

A fundamental starting point in this third and more critical tradition is that articulated by Young in his argument that there is a 'dialectical relationship between access to power and the opportunity to legitimize certain dominant categories, and the processes by which the availability of such categories to some groups enables them to assert power and control over others.'16 Thus, to put it another way, the problematic involves examining how a system of unequal power in society is main-tained, and partly recreated, by means of the 'transmission' of culture.'17 The school, as a rather significant agent of cultural and economic reproduction (after all, every child goes to it and it has im-portant effects as both a credentialing and socializing institution) becomes an important institution here, obviously.

Like the socialization tradition, the focus of these investigations has been on how a society stabilizes itself. What is the place of schools in maintaining the way economic and educational goods and services are controlled, produced, and distributed? However, these questions are guided by a more critical posture than, say, Dreeben. For much of these individuals' commitment to this particular kind of problem stems from an affiliation with socialist movements. They begin with something

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similar to the position I took in Chapter 1. This is broadly like a Rawlsian theory of justice: i.e. for a society to be truly just, it must maximize the advantage of the least advantaged.18 Thus, any society which increases the relative gap between, say, rich and poor in the con-trol of and access to cultural and economic 'capital' (as recent economic reports show ours does, for instance) needs to be questioned. How is this inequality made legitimate? Why is it accepted? As Gramsci would put it, how is this hegemony maintained?

For many of these researchers, this seeming social and ideological stability is seen in part "as relying upon the deep and often unconscious internalization by the individual of the principles which govern the existing social order."19 However, these principles are not perceived as being neutral. They are seen as intimately interconnected with economic and political stratification.

For example, in the American, British, and French analyses currently being done by Bowles and Gintis, Bernstein, Young, and Bourdieu, the individual's underlying perception of the social order of which he or she is a part provides the locus of understanding. Thus, to take one instance, in the words of a British commentator on Bowles and Gintis's interesting but too mechanistic book.20 In the work of Bowles and Gintis emphasis is given to the importance of schooling in forming the different personality types which correspond to the requirements of a system of work relations within an economic mode of production.21 In this way, for Bowles and Gintis, not only does education allocate individuals to a relatively fixed set of positions in society &emdash; an allocation of positions determined by economic and political forces&emdash;but the process of education itself, the formal and hidden curriculum, socializes people to accept as legitimate the limited roles they ultimately fill in society.22

Other similarly oriented scholars take a comparable stance in examining the effect schools may have on the formation of the consciousness of individuals. Thus, for instance, Basil Bernstein has argued that, to a significant extent, 'through education the individual's "mental structures" (i.e. categories of thought, language and behavior) are formed, and that these mental structures derive from the social division of labor." In France, the investigation of the relationship between cultural reproduction and economic reproduction is being carried out in a parallel vein by Bourdieu. He analyzes the cultural rules, what he calls the habitus, that link economic and cultural control and distribution together.23

Bourdieu focuses on the student's ability to cope with what might be called 'middle class culture.' He argues that the cultural capital stored in schools acts as an effective filtering device in the reproduction of a hierarchical society. For example, schools partly recreate the social

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and economic hierarchies of the larger society through what is seem-ingly a neutral process of selection and instruction. They take the cul-tural capital, the habitus, of the middle class, as natural and employ it as if all children have had equal access to it. However, 'by taking all children as equal, while implicitly favoring those who have already, acquired the linguistic and social competencies to handle middle-class culture, schools take as natural what is essentially a social gift, i.e. cultural capital.'24 Bourdieu asks us, hence, to think of cultural capital as we would economic capital. Just as our dominant economic institu-tions are structured so that those who inherit or already have economic capital do better, so too does cultural capital act in the same way. Cul-tural capital ('good taste,' certain kinds of prior knowledge, abilities and language forms) is unequally distributed throughout society and this is dependent in large part on the division of labor and power in that ! society. 'By selecting for such properties, schools serve to reproduce the distribution of power within the society.'25 For Bourdieu, to understand completely what schools do, who succeeds and who fails, one must not see culture as neutral, as necessarily contributing to social progress. Rather, one sees the culture tacitly preserved in and expected by schools as contributing to inequality outside of these institutions. Behind these points, hence, is an argument that states that we shall have to recognize that, like poverty, poor achievement is not an aberra-tion. Both poverty and curricular problems such as low achievement are integral products of the organization of economic, cultural, and social life as we know it.26 I shall have more to say about seeing many curri-culum problems, such as achievement, as 'naturally produced' by our institutions shortly, when we consider the formal corpus of school knowledge further in the next section of this analysis.

Given arguments of this type, then, what is it that this third tradi-tion is basically saying?27

The assumption underlying most of the 'reproduction' theories is that education plays a mediating role between the individual's con-sciousness and society at large. These theorists maintain that the rules which govern social behavior, attitudes, morals and beliefs are fltered down from the macro level of economic and political struc-tures to the individual via work experience, educational processes and family socialization. The individual acquires a particular aware-ness and perception of the society in which he lives. And it is this understanding and attitude towards the social order which [in large part] constitute his consciousness.

Schools, therefore, 'process' both knowledge and people. In essence, the formal and informal knowledge is used as a complex flter to pro-cess people, often by class; and, at the same time, different dispositions

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and values are taught to different school populations, again often by class (and sex and race). In effect, for this more critical tradition, schools latently recreate cultural and economic disparities, though this is certainly not what most school people intend at all.

Let me pause here to darify one thing: this is not to maintain that either culture or consciousness is mechanistically determined (in the strong sense of that term) by economic structum. Rather, it seeks to bring to a level of awareness and make historically and empirically problematic the dialectical relationship between cultural control and distribution and economic and political stratification.28 Our ordinary perceptions &emdash; ones taken from the achievement and socialization models&emdash;hence, are bracketed. The 'cognitive interest' underlying the research program is to look relationally, if you will, to think about school knowledge as being generated out of ideological and economic conflicts 'outside' as well as 'inside' education. These conflicts and forces set limits on (not mechanistically determine) cultural responses. This requires subtlety, not appraisals which argue for a one-to one correspondence between institutional life and cultural forms. Neither all curricula nor all culture are 'mere products' of simple economic forces.29

In fact, I want to note a critical caveat at this point. There is an ob-vious danger here, one that should not go unrecognized. To make the actual 'stuff' of curriculum problematic, to hold what currently counts as legitimate knowledge up to ideological scrutiny, can lead to a rather vulgar brand of relativism. That is, to see overt and hidden curricular knowledge as social and historical products ultimately tends to raise questions about the criteria of validity and truth we employ.30 The epistemological issues that might be raised here are not uninteresting, to say the least. However, the point behind these investigations is not to totally relativize either our knowledge or our criteria for warranting its truth or falsity (though the Marxist tradition has a long history of just this debate as the controversy between, say, Adorno and Popper documents. We have much to learn from the epistemological and politi-cal issues raised by this debate, by the way.)31 Rather, as I just mentioned, the methodological dictum is to think relationally or struc-turally. In clearer terms, one should look for the subtle connections between educational phenomena, such as curriculum, and the latent social and economic outcomes of the institution.

These points are obviously similar to those often associated with the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School who have argued that the context in which we perceive social facts, the general way we conceptually organize our wodd, may hide the fact that these seemingly commonsensical appearances serve particular interests.32 But these interests cannot merely be assumed; they need to be documented. In

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order to lay some of the foundation of this documentation, we shall need to turn to some of the hypotheses that I mentioned earlier I would suggest. We shall need to explore how cultural distribution and economic power are intimately intertwined, not just in the teaching of 'moral knowledge' as in some of the reproduction theorists, but in the formal corpus of school knowledge itself.

On the problem of high status knowledge

The discussion in the previous sections of this chapter centered on deepening our understanding of the general political, economic, and conceptual arguments that those people interested in the problem of ideology and curriculum have focused upon. It compared this critical tradition to the current achievement and socialization models pre-dominant in the field. I should now like to take one aspect of the relationship between cultural distribution and economic power and explore it further. I want to employ this critical framework to engage in some speculations about how certain knowledge&emdash;particularly that knowledge which is considered to be most prestigious in schools&emdash;may in fact be linked to economic reprodu,ction. In essence, I want to begin to think through some of the issues associated with the distribution of knowledge and the creation of inequality that people like Bourdieu, Bernstein, Young, and others have sought to raise. At the forefront of our minds, I think, should be Bourdieu's point that I noted in the last section. If you want to understand how cultural and economic-political forms work in tandem, then think of both as aspects of capital.

In order to delve into the connections between these forms, I shall be using the language of cultural 'transmissions,' in effect treating cul-tural artifacts and knowledge as if they were things. However, the notion of 'as if' must be understood as exactly that, as a metaphor for dealing with a much more complex process in which, say, students do not merely take in information, cultural attributes, etc., but rather they also transform (and sometimes reject) these expected dispositions, propensities, skills, and facts into biographically significant meanings.33 Thus, while the act of treating knowledge as a thing makes for ease of discussion, a methodological simplification if you will, it needs to be understood as just such a simplifying act. (The fact that it is usually considered a thing in our society does of course point to its reification as a commodity in advanced industrial societies.)

Once again, one of Michael F. D. Young's arguments is helpful as a beginning here. He states that 'those in positions of power will attempt to define what is taken as knowledge, how accessible to different groups any knowledge is, and what are accepted relationships between

page 35

different knowledge areas and between those who have access to them and make them available.'35 Though this is undoubtedly more related to how hegemony acts to saturate our consciousness and is not always or even necessarily a conscious process of manipulation and control, and hence may be a bit overstated, it does raise the issue of the relative status of knowledge and its accessibility. For within this statement is a proposition that might entail something like the following. The possession of high status knowledge, knowledge that is considered of exceptional import and is connected to the structure of corporate economies, is related to and in fact seems to entail the non-possession by others. In essence, high status knowledge 'is by definition scarce, and its scarcity is inextricably linked to its instrumentality.'36

This is an exceptionally critical point and needs to be gone into a bit further. I have aruged that schools do not merely 'process' people but that they 'process' knowledge as well. They enhance and give legiti-macy to particular types of cultural resources which are related to unequal economic forms. In order to understand this, we want to think about the kinds of knowledge that schools take as the most important, that they want to maxunize. I shall define this as technical knowledge, not to denigrate it, but to differentiate it from, say, aesthetics, physical grace, and so on. The conception of the maximization of technical knowledge is a useful pdnciple, I think, to begin to unpack some of the linkages between cultural capital and economic capital. 37

Our kind of economic system is organized in such a way that it can create only a certain amount of jobs and still maintain high profit levels for corporations. In essence, the economic apparatus is at its most efficient when there is a (measured) unemployment rate of approximately 4-6 per cent (though we know that this is a notoriously inaccurate measure to which must also be added both the issues of much higher rates for blacks, high levels of underemployment and the unpaid work of many women in the home). To provide useful work for these individuals would require cutting into acceptable rates of return, and would probably require at least the partial reorganization of so called 'market mechanisms' which apportion jobs and resources. Because of this it would not be a misplaced metaphor to deschbe our economic system as naturally generating specifiable levels of under and unemployment.38 We can think of this model as one which is pdmarily concerned with the maximization of the production of profit and only secondadly concerned with the distribution of resources and employ ment.

Now a similar model seems to hold true when we think about know-ledge in its relationship to such an economy. A corporate economy requires the production of high levels of technical knowledge to keep the economic apparatus running effectively and to become more

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sophisticated in the maximization of opportunities for economic expan-sion. Within certain limits, what is actually required is not the widespread distHbution of this high status knowledge to the populace in general. What is needed more is to maximize its production. As long as the knowledge form is continually and efficiently produced, the school itself, at least in this major aspect of its function, is efficient. Thus, certain low levds of achievement on the part of 'minority' group students, children of the poor and so on, can be tolerated. It is less consequential to the economy than is the generation of the knowledge itself. Once again, production of a particular 'commodity' (here high status knowledge) is of more concern than the disthbution of that particular commodity. To the extent that it does not interfere with the production of technical knowledge, then concerns about distributing it more equitably can be tolerated as well.

Thus, just as in the 'economic market place' where it is more efficient to have a relatively constant level of unemployment, to actually generate it really, so do cultural institutions 'naturally' generate levels of poor achievement. The distribution or scarcity of certain forms of cultural capital is of less moment in this calculus of values than the maximization of the production of the particular know-ledge itself.

This, I think, goes a long way in partially explaining the economic role of the debate on standards and open enrollment at universities. It also clarifies some of the reasons schools and curricula seem to be organized toward university life in terms of the dominance of subject centered curdcula and the relative prestige given to diffedng curdcula areas. This relationship between economic structure and high status knowledge might also explain some of the large disparities we see in levds of funding for curricular innovations in technical areas and, say, the arts.

The structure of discipline movement provides an interesting example of a number of these points about power and culture. The dis-cipline centered approach was not a serious challenge to the traditional view of curriculum. Rather it was an argument that a particular commodity&emdash;here academic knowledge&emdash;-by a particular community was not being effectively 'marketed' in schools.39 Even when it was accepted by most school people as the most important curricular know-ledge and was given large doses of federal support to assist its adoption in schools, competing power claims were evident about what was to be high status knowledge.

For instance, substantial funding was given to mathematics and science curriculum development while less was given to the arts and humanities. This occurred then and still occurs now for two possible reasons. First is the question of economic utility. The benefits of

page 37

maximizing the production of scientific and technical knowledge are easily visible and, at least at the time, seemed relatively non-controversial. Second, high-status knowledge appears to be discrete knowledge. It has a (supposedly) identifiable content and (again supposedly) stable structure 40 that are both teachable and, what is criti-cally important, testable. The arts and humanities have obviously been seen to be less amenable to such criteria, supposedly because of the very nature of their subject matter. Thus, one has a twofold, nearly circular proposition worWng here. High status knowledge is seen as macro-economically beneficial in terms of long run benefits to the most powerful classes in society; and the socially accepted definitions of high status knowledge preclude consideration of non-technical knowledge.

It is important to note the stress on macro economic considerations. Obviously, television repair is a subject which, if learned well, may pro-vide economic benefits to its user. However, the economy itself will not be unduly impaired if this is not accorded prestige status. In fact, if Braverman's analysis is correct&emdash;that our economic structure requires the continual division and breaking down of complex skills into less complex and more standardized skills &emdash;economic control may be helped by the lack of prestige given to such craftsmanship. The same does not seem to hold true for technical knowledge.41

We have two levels working here again. The constitutive or underlying social and economic rules make it essential that subject-centered curricula be taught, that high status be given to technical knowledge. This is in large part due to the selection function of school-ing. Though this is more complex than I can go into here, it is easier to stratify individuals according to 'academic criteria' when technical knowledge is used. This stratification or grouping is important in large part because not all individuals are seen as having the ability to contribute to the generation of the required knowledge form. Thus, the cultural content (legitimate or high status knowledge) is used as a device or filter for economic stratification,42 thereby enhancing the continued expansion of technical knowledge in an economy like ours, as well. At the same time, however, one might expect that within this constitutive framework, educators would be relatively free to respond (or not to respond) to more immediate economic pressures such as career education and so forth.

In short, one major reason that subject-centered curricula dominate most schools, that integrated curricula are found in relatively few schools, is at least partly the result of the place of the school in maximi-zing the production of high status knowledge. This is closely interrela-ted with the school's role in the selection of agents to fill economic and social positions in a relatively stratified society that the analysts of the political economy of education have sought to portray.

page 38

With Young, I have suggested here that some of the relations among who controls rewards and power in a society, the pattems of dominant values, and the organization of cultural capital can best be uncovered by focusing on the stratification of knowledge. It would not be illogical to claim that, based on what I have argued here, generally, any attempt to make substantive alterations in the relationship between high status and low status knowledge, by, say, making different knowledge areas equal, will tend to be resisted. This would also probably mean that attempts to use different criteria to judge the relative value of differ-ent curricular areas will be looked at as illegitimate incursions, as threats to that particular 'order.'43

Examples of this are not difficult to find in the area of evaluation. For instance, the usual way one evaluates the success of curricula is by employing a technical procedure, by comparing input with output. Were test scores raised? Did the students master the material? This is, of course, the achievement model I described earlier. When educators or policy analysts want to evaluate in another, less technical way, by looking at the 'quality' of that curricular experience or by raising questions about the ethical nature of the relationships involved in the interaction, they can be rather easily dismissed. Scientific and technical talk in advanced industrial societies has more legitimacy (high status) than ethical talk. Ethical talk cannot be easily operationalized within an input-output perspective. And, finally, 'scientific' criteria of evalua-tion give 'knowledge,' while ethical criteria lead to purely 'subjective' considerations. This has important implications for our view of ourselves as neutral and will become of increasing significance when we analyze how 'science' functions in education later on.

A current example might be helpful here. After massive reanalysis of studies relating schooling to mobility, Jencks, in Inequality, concluded that it was quite difficult to generalize about the roles schools play in increasing one's chances at a better future. Thus, he notes that it might be wiser to focus less on mobility and achievement and more on the quality of a student's actual experience in classrooms, something with strangely (though pleasantly) Deweyan overtones. How-ever, Jencks's argument that we must pay greater attention to the quality of life within our educational institutions had its roots in ethical and political considerations and was dismissed rather readily. His criteria for making that statement were perceived as being illegitimate. They had little validity within the particular set of language games of which evaluation partakes, and, hence are accorded little status.44

Notice something else about what this insistence on technical criteria does. It makes both the kinds of questions raised, and the answers given to them, the province of experts, those individuals who possess the knowledge already. In this way, the relative status of the knowledge is

page 39

linked to the kinds of questions deemed acceptable, which in turn seems to be linked to its non-possession by other individuals. The form of the questions becomes an aspect of cultural reproduction since these questions can only be answered by experts who already have had the technical knowledge distributed to them. The stratification of knowledge in this case again involves the stratification of people, though less on an economic level here.

Hegemony and reproduction

All of this is quite involved, obviously, and rather difficult to untangle, I know. While our understanding of these knotty relationships is still tentative, it does raise anew one of the questions I referred to before. Given the subtle connections in this process of the generation of cul-tural as well as economic reproduction, how and why do people accept it? Hence, the question of hegemony, of ideological stability, that is raised by the reproduction theorists emerges once more.45 For it is here than the research of Bowles and Gintis, Bernstein, Bourdieu and others on the social reproduction of the values, norms, and dispositions transmitted by the cultural apparatus of a society offers part of an ex-planation. One form of reproduction (through 'socialization' and what has been called the hidden curriculum) which we shall examine in the next three chapters, complements another (the formal corpus of school knowledge), each of which seems to have ties to economic inequality. It is in the interplay between curricular knowledge &emdash;the stuff we teach, the 'legitimate culture'&emdash;and the social relations of classroom life that the reproduction theorists describe, that we can begin to see some of the real relations schools have to an unequal economic structure.

Again notice what I am saying, for it constitutes part of an argument against the conspiracy theories so popular in some revisionist critiques of schooling. This process of reproduction is not caused (in the strong sense of that concept) by an elite group of managers who sat or now sit around tables plotting ways to 'do in' their workers at both the work-place and the school. While as we shall see in Chapter 4, such an account may accurately describe some aspects of why schools do what they do, 46 it is not a sufficient explanation of the nexus of forces that actually seem to exist. I am arguing, instead, that given the extant economic and political forms which now provide the principles upon which so much of our everyday lives are organized, this reproductive process is a 'logical necessity' for the continued maintenance of an unequal social order. The economic and cultural unbalance follows 'naturally.'47

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This may make it hard for educators such as ourselves to deal with the problem. We may, in fact, have to take seriously the political and economic commitments that guide the reproduction theorists. Serious educational analysis may require a more coherent theory of the social and economic polity of which we are a part. While I have explored cultural mechanisms here, it is just as essential to remember Raymond Williams's point that neither culture, nor education are free-floating. To forget that is to neglect a primary arena for collective actions and commitment.

Some of this economic concern is summarized by Henry Levin. In a review of the effects of large-scale educational interventions by the government to try to reduce economic inequality through reforms in curriculum and teaching, he concludes that :48

Educational policies that are aimed at resolving social dilemmas that arise out of the basic malfunctioning of the economic, social and political institutions of the society are not amenable to solution through educational policy and reform. The leverage available to the most benevolent educational reformer and policy specialist is limited by the lack of a constituency for change and the overwhelming momentum of the educational process in the direction of social reproduction of the existing polity. And, there is a deleterious result in our efforts if educational attempts to change society tend to direct attention away from the focus of the problem by creating and legitimating the ideology that schools can be used to solve prob-lems which did not originate in the educational sector.

Yet once again, we must be cautious of this kind of approach, for it can lead us back to viewing schools as little black boxes once more. And that is what we rejected at the outset.

Some concluding questions

I want to stop here, knowing full well that much more could be and needs to be said about the topics I have raised. For example, in order to go further with the relationship between high status knowledge and an 'external' social order, one would have to inquire into the history of the concomitant rise of new classes of social personnel and the growth of new types of 'legitimate' knowledge.49 These issues obviously require much more thought to be given to the conceptual problem of the dialectical relationship between cultural control and social and economic structure. How does each affect the other? What role does an educa-tional system itself play in defining particular forms of knowledge as high status? What role does it play in helping to create a credentialing

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process based on the possession (and non-possession) of this cultural capital, a credentialing system that provides numbers of agents roughly equivalent to the needs of the division of labor in society? These questions imply something important I think, for this relationship is not a one-way street. Education is both a 'cause' and an 'effect' here. The school is not a passive mirror, but an acave force, one that also serves to give legitimacy to economic and social forms and ideologies so intimately connected to it.50 And it is just this action which needs to be unpacked.

Questions of this type are not usually asked in curriculum of course. However, we need to remember that these concerns are not something totally new to the discourse surrounding American education. In fact, we must not see this kind of sociologically and economically inclined curriculum scholarship as being an attempt to carry on any 'recon-ceptualization' of the curriculum field, though that name has been applied to some recent analysts of power and school knowledge.51 Rather, the questions which guide this work need to be seen as having rather deep roots in the curriculum field, roots we may have unfortu-nately forgotten given the ahistorical nature of education.

We need only recall what stimulated the early social reconstruction-ists in education (Counts, Smith-Stanley-Shores, and others) to begin to realize that one of the guiding themes in past curriculum work has been the role schools fulfill in the reproduction of an unequal society. While these individuals may have been much too optimistic in viewing schools as powerful agencies in redressing this imbalance, and while a number of them ultimately backed away from large-scale structural alterations in our polity,52 the principle of examining the linkages between cultural and economic institutions is a valued part of our past. It is time to make it our present and future, as well.

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Chapter 2: Ideology and cultural and economic reproduction

Footnotes

I Thomas R. Bates, 'Gramsci and The Theory of Hegemony,' Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVI (Aprill-June 1975),36.

2 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,1936).

3 This is.of course best laid out by Peter Berger and Thomas Luck-mann, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966). The most articulate challenge to the use of such 'phenomenological' formulations in education is found in Rachel Sharp and Anthony Green, Education and Social Control: A Study in Progres-sivePrimary Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).

4 Geoff Whitty, 'Sociology and the Problem of Radical Educational Change,' Educability, Schools and Ideology, Michael Flude and John Ahier, eds (London: Halstead Press,1974), p. 125.

5 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961),pp. 119-20.

6 Herbert M. Kliebard, 'Persistent Curriculum Issues in Historical Perspective,' Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, William Pinar, ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1975), pp.39-50.

7 Taped interview given at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The necessity for large-scale educational reform movements to have this cautious penumbra of vagueness is analyzed further in B. Paul Komisar and James McClellan, 'The Logic of Slogans,' Language and Concepts in Education, B. Othanel Smith and Robert Ennis, eds (Chicago: Rand McNally,1961), pp. 195-214.

8 See, for example, Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977) and Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes

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Notes to pages 29-33

and Control, Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Trans-missions (2nd edn; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1977).

9 Joseph Schwab, The Practical: A Language for Curriculum (Washington: National Education Association, 1970), and Dwayne Huebner, 'Implications of Psychological Thought for the Curricu-lum,' Influences in Curriculum Change, Glenys Unruh and Robert Leeper, eds (Washington: Association for the Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1968, pp. 28-37).

10 These issues are discussed further in Chapter 3 below and in Geoff Whitty and Nlichael Young, eds, Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge (Nafferton, England: Nafferton Books,1976).

11 1 am drawing on the insightful exposition of these two research traditions in Philip Wexler, 'Ideology and Utopia in American Sociology of Education,' Education in a Changing Society, Antonia Kloskowska and Guido Martinotti, eds (London: Sage, 1977) pp. 27-58.

12 Robert Dreeben, On What is Learned in Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley,1968).

13 Michael F. D. Young, 'On the Politics of Educational Knowledge,' Education in Creat Britain and Ireland, R. Bell, ed. (London: Oxford,1973), p. 201.

14 Wexler, op. cit.

15 For further examination of the roots of this tradition see Michael W. Apple, 'Power and School Knowledge,' The Review of Education, III (January/February 1977), 2649, and Michael W. Apple and Philip Wexler, 'Cultural Capital and Educational Transmissions,' Educational Theory, XXVIII (Winter 1978).

16 Michael F. D. Young, 'Knowledge and Control,' Knowledge and Control, Michael F. D. Young, ed. (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), p. 8.

17 Bourdieu and Passeron, op. cit. p. 5.

18 1 have analyzed the conceptuai and political commitments further in Apple, 'Power and School Knowledge,'op. cit.

19 Madeleine MacDonald, The Curriculum and Cultural Reproduction (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1977), p. 60.

20 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

21 MacDonald, op. cit., p. 309. This piece also provides a number of interesting criticisms of Bowles and Gintis's reliance on a corres-pondence theory.

22 John W. Meyer, "fhe Effects of Education as an Institution,' American Journal of Sociology, LXXXIII (July 1977), 64.

23 MacDonald, op. cit.

24 Roger Dale, et al., eds, Schooling and Capitalism: A Sociological Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 4.

25 Ibid.

26 R. W. Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 219. How this actually operates,

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Notes to pages 33-6

especially through the complex process of labeling that goes on in schools, will be explored further in Chapter 7.

27 MacDonald, op. cit.

28 The two way nature of this relationship - how culture and econo-mics interpenetrate and act on each other in a dynamic fashion - is best examined in Raymond Williams,'Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,' New Left Review, LXXXII (November/ December 1973).

29 Ibid. See also the final chapter, 'Aspects of the Relations between Education and Production,'in Bernstein, op. cit.

30 Michael F. D. Young, 'Taking Sides Against the Probable,' Ration-ality, Education and The Social Organization of Knowledge (Lon-don, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 86-96 and Michael W. Apple, 'Curriculum as Ideological Selection,' Comparative Educa-tion Review, XX (June,1976), 209-15.

31 See, for example, Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York Herder and Herder, 1971), especially Chapter 1. See also the discussion of the position taken by the French Marxist philosopher of science Louis Althusser in Miriam Glucksmann, Structuralist Analysis in Contemporary Social Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1974). Though it may be difficult to deal with 'proving' critically oriented social assertions using the positiv-ist tradition, this does not mean that empirical documentation of aspects of the problem is inconsequential. This is nicely argued B~ Connell, op. cit.

32 lan Hextall and Madan Sarup, 'School Knowledge, Evaluation and Alienation,' Society, State and Schooling, Michael Young and (;eoff Whitty, eds (London: Falmer Press,1977), pp. I 51 -71.

33 See the articles by Mehan and McKay in Hans Peter Dreitzel, ed., Childhood and Socialization (New York: Macmillan, 1973), and Linda M. McNeil, 'Economic Dimensions of Social Studies Curricula: Curriculum as Institutionalized Knowledge' (unpub-lished doctoral thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977).

34 Whitty, op. cit.

35 Michael F. D. Young,'An Approach to the Study of Curricula as Socially Organized Knowledge,'in Young, Knowledge and Control, op. cit. There are interesting parallels here between the work of Young and Huebner in their joint focus on curricular accessibility. Compare Dwayne Huebner, 'Curriculum as the Accessibility of Knowledge' (unpublished paper presented at Curriculum Theory Study Group, Minneapolis, 2 March 1970, mimeographed).

36 Bernice Fischer, 'Conceptual Masks: An Essay Review of Fred Inglis, Ideology and The Imagination,' Review of Education, I (November 1975), 526. See also Hextall and Sarup, op. cit.

37 The principle that schools serve to maximize the production of technical knowledge was first noted by Walter Feinberg in his pro-vocative chapter 'A Critical Analysis of the Social and Economic Limits to the Humanizing of Education,' Humanistic Education

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Notes to pages 36-40

Visions and Realities, Richard H. Weller, ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan 1977), pp. 249~9. My analysis here is indebted to his own.

38 Andrew Hacker, 'Cutting Classes,' New York Review of lRooks, XXIII (May, 1976), 15. Hacker notes that at full employment our economy can usefully use only about 43 per cent of the work age population. It is not profitable to employ more than that. 'Some of the unnecessary 57 per cent become housewives, college students, or retire on moderate pensions. Others, however, must settle for a lifetime of poverty because the economic system offers them no alternatives.'

39 Geoff Whitty and Michael F. D. Young, 'The Politics of Schoo] Knowledge,' Times Educational Supplement, 5 September 1973, 20.

40 This is an empirical claim, of course, and is falsifiable. There are a number of educators and scientists who would take issue with such a simplification of science and mathematics. See, for example, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1970). What aspects of scientific 'paradigms' are stable is being argued right now. See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds, Criticism and the Crowth of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1970) and Stephen Toulmin,Human Understand-ing (Princeton University Press,1972).

41 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press,1975).

42 The close relationship between academic curricula, the distribution of scarce resources, and the labeling and tracking of high school students is documented in James E. Rosenbaum, Making Inequality (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976).

43 Young, 'An Approach to the Study of Curriculum as Socially Organized Knowledge,'op. cit., p.34.

44 Habermas's analysis of how purposive/rational or instrumental forms of language and action have come to dominate our consciousness is illuminating here. Cf., Jurgen Habermas, Know-ledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) and Michael W. Apple, 'The Process and Ideology of Valuing in Educa-tional Settings,' Educational Evaluation: Analysis and Respons-ibility, Michael W. Apple, et al., eds (Berkeley: McCutchan,1974), pp. 3-34. We would want to trace the growth in status of purposive/ rational forms of action within the concomitant growth of particu-lar economic systems. Raymond Williams's corpus of work provides essential models for this kind of inquiry. See his The Long Revolution, op. cit. and The Country and the City, op. cit.

45 Reviews of some of the relevant research on the question of hege-mony can be found in David W. Livingston, 'On Hegemony in Corporate Capitalist States,' Sociological Inquiry, XLVI (nos 3 and 4, 1976), 235-50 and R. W. Connell, op. cit., especially Chapters 7-10.

46 See also, Herbert Gintis and Samuel Bowles, 'Educational Reform

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Notes to pages 40-2

in the U.S.: An Historical and Statistical Survey' (New York: The World Bank, March 1977, mimeographed).

47 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, op. cit., pp. 298-9.

48 Henry M. Levin, 'A Radical Critique of Educational Policy'(Stan-ford, California: Occasional Paper of the Stanford University Evaluation Consortium, March,1977, mimeographed), pp. 26-7.

49 Basil Bernstein has made some intriguing inroads into this area in his 'Aspects of the Relations Between Education and Produc-tion' in Bernstein, op. cit. See also, Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975) and Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism (New York: Norton,1976).

50 See the interesting essay by John W. Meyer, op. cit. Randall Collins's attempt to articulate a theory of cultural markets, in 'Some Comparative Principles of Educational Stratification,' Harvard Educational Review, XLVII (February, 1977), 1-27, is also of some assistance here. It is a bit conceptually confused, though. See my reply to him in Harvard Educational Review, XLVII (November 1977), 601-2.

51 William Pinar, ed., Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (Berkeley: McCutchan,1975).

52 Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Founda-tions of Twentieth Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: John Wiley,1975).

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