Note: After getting extremely busy during the summer and autumn, I’ve finally worked out my schedule to dive back into my writing about Critical Pedagogy—hopefully I’ll be able to produce content a little more regularly going forward. Enjoy!
Chapter 3 of The Critical Turn in Education summarizes the contributions to Critical Pedagogy made by Michael Apple and explains why those contributions represent an essential step in the Development of Critical Pedagogy. This is no easy task because Apple is both prolific and flagrantly (perhaps even deliberately) unclear in his writing. Reading through this chapter, I think that Apple brought two new aspects to education: a shift in philosophical emphasis from classical Marxism to Gramscian/Neo-Marxism, and a focus on curriculum as a vehicle for raising “Marxist Consciousness.” Both remain prominent features of Critical Pedagogy to this day.
Summary: Ideology and Hegemony
If anyone could have been conditioned into Marxism it was Michael Apple. He was the child of Marxists activists and began social activism at a young age, ultimately opting to focus on the field of education. Apple attended the Teacher’s College of Columbia University in the late 1960s where many of his early influences were from the Continental school of philosophy rather than being explicitly Marxist. While those more versed in Continental Philosophy might disagree, it’s been my sense that Continental thought tends to lead toward Marxism for the more politically minded, particularly after the failures of Right-Collectivist political ideologies during the Second World War (Stephen Hicks’s brilliant book Explaining Postmodernism is an excellent primer on Continental Philosophy and the political consequences it has wrought through the last century).1 Given this background, it’s not shocking Apple would find agreement with the Neo-Marxists.
Critical Marxism in Education
Much of Apple’s initial work focused on refining the analysis of the “Hidden Curriculum” and how he believed it operated to produce “political quiescence”2 in society. Apple contended that the concept of “conflict” should be made central to every aspect of educational content from history to science. He reasoned that since conflict is essential to the development of intellectual and material advancements, it should be centralized in the process of education. I’ll discuss Apple’s treatment of “conflict” as an essential concept later, but this strikes me as an initial attempt to replace the content of a subject in education with the sociology of that subject—a practice that has become common today. For example, see the paper “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study,” by Robertson and Hairston.3
Eventually, Apple worked with Alvin Gouldner, who helped Apple wed his initial thoughts on the Hidden Curriculum with Marxian Sociology. By the early 1970’s, Apple graduated from Teacher’s College and started formulating his “critical” approach to studying education. In essence, this approach consisted of identifying problematic “commonsense” (we’ll untangle this crossover term later) practices in education, connecting these practices to how the current social order was maintained, and engaging in activism to “help schools and society move toward radical social change.” As we’ll see, Apple does a fair bit of intellectual sleight of hand when using the term “commonsense,” but it is notable that his approach towards education in the 1970s heralded the tactics that we see from the Critical Social Justice movement today. Essentially, Apple was testing the weapons that the Woke have come to rely on fifty years later.
Apple’s approach contrasted sharply with that of Bowles and Gintis (the subjects of Chapter 2 of The Critical Turn in Education) who believed education functioned as a “black box” that reproduced the injustices of the existing society. Apple wanted to open that box to expose society’s views on what counted as “knowledge,” what it meant to be “educated,” and how these ideas both reproduced society’s injustices and were instrumental in causing them in the first place.
Modern apologists for the Left claim that the ideas associated with Critical Social Justice (including Apple’s) cannot be considered Marxist (despite many prominent leaders vocally proclaiming themselves to be, in fact, Marxist) because they lack the focus on economics and class associated with Marxism. This would be akin to claiming that because Protestant sects of Christianity do not believe that the eucharist literally transforms into the blood and body of Christ, they are not actually Christians. While Catholics might make this argument, it doesn’t change the fact that the similar beliefs, premises and influences of Protestants and Catholics makes it accurate to categorize both as a type of “Christian.”
Michael Apple’s intellectual progression shows how he shared the fundamental premises of Marxism: existing society was fundamentally exploitative and oppressive, this state could not be changed within the existing system because it had been imposed by those who held power in the system, and that an awakened consciousness in the oppressed was needed to bring about the required revolution. To the extent that he and other Neo-Marxists diverged from Marxist orthodoxy, it wasn’t even really a disagreement, so much as a tweak to explain why they were still right even though none of Marx’s bizarre predictions had been born out.
Just as a disagreement about the nature of the sacrament does not change the fact that Catholics and Protestants are both Christian, a disagreement in the “fundamental axis of oppression” does not change the fact that Classical Marxism and Critical Social Justice share a conviction that the world is divided into oppressed and oppressor. Michael Apple represents one of the early intellectuals (at least in education) who would reject Marx’s purely economic formulation in favor of something that focused on how mechanisms of culture blocked the Marxist Revolution from occurring.
Gramscian Hegemony
As with many Neo-Marxist intellectuals, Apple’s thought congealed around the ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci identified institutions that were essential to a strong culture, the most important being: Family, Church, Media, Law, and Education. True to his Marxist convictions, Gramsci’s analysis immediately turned towards the ways these institutions were instruments of oppression imposed by the bourgeoisie that prevent the oppressed from attaining an awakened consciousness. Gramsci proposed that these five cultural pillars formed a “Hegemony” that would prevent a culture from undergoing a Marxist revolution. He argued for Marxists to form a “Counter-Hegemony” in each of these institutions that would turn this institutional power towards awakening the consciousness of the oppressed (see the Repeated Terms section for more analysis).
Long after Gramsci’s Death, Michael Apple would become his point-man in American Education. With the addition of Gramscian thought, Apple would redouble his criticism of “commonsense” in education, as it was through such “commonsense” ideas that Cultural Hegemony would be maintained by the oppressor class.
Around the same time, a so-called “New Sociology of Education” was being developed in Britain. This approach emphasized a “study of experience” in approaching educational philosophy and reforms. This movement also drew heavily on Gramscian thought, but it was a bit different in that it purported to “offer a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between personal experience and the structure of powerful social institutions that help shape those experiences.”4 In essence, this amounted to a bottom-up approach to Gramscian Marxism rather than the top-down approach that was more prevalent among American Marxists. Apple would ultimately synthesize these two approaches in a way that effectively squeezed the top and the bottom simultaneously.
Ideology and Curriculum
Apple published Ideology and Curriculum in 1979 as a collection of several of his previous essays on education along with some new ideas. The essential feature of this book was to bring together the work Apple had done in elucidating the role of Gramscian “hegemony” in education and offer strategies for educators operating under this conception of education.
With a conspiratorial bend that would become increasingly common in Neo-Marxist ideology, Apple argued that the reason educational systems reproduced the existing society is because the ideology of the status quo gains hegemonic control over the educational institutions and uses that control force those who pass through the system to maintain the ideology (note that ideology is treated almost as an independent entity with its own wills and desires). Though Apple thought of his work as being based on direct experience with students and teachers in the classroom, his “observational approach” was really just a way to fit a variety of specific individuals and circumstances into his established narrative of ideological hegemony in the classroom. Put another way: the question for Apple wasn’t, “Is ideological indoctrination occurring in this classroom?” The question was: “How is ideological indoctrination manifesting in this classroom interaction.” (This approach would eventually be transferred to the domain of race and popularized by Robin DiAngelo.)5
Conforming to James Lindsay’s identification that, “the Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses,”6 Apple’s “solution” amounts to infusing his own “correct” ideology into the classroom (it’s worth noting that Marxists, particularly Neo-Marxists don’t see it this way, as they believe their position is the only one that is free of ideology). Following the Gramscian prescription, Apple’s overarching goal was (and is) to create a counter-hegemony in the educational system that will cause it to be an agent of struggle against the existing society rather than something that reproduces the status quo. Apple advocated a two-pronged approach: first, turn the teacher into “an organic intellectual who participates in the struggle against hegemony,”7 or more simply, turn the teachers into activists. Second, identify ways in which the texts and curriculum maintain cultural hegemony and replace these with texts and curriculum that contribute to consciousness raising. Once these are in place, the critical educators, armed with counter-hegemonic curriculum descend on the students with something that has an outward appearance of traditional education, but has been turned to the purpose of raising a critical consciousness in students.
Gottesman’s summary tends to be more abstract in describing Apple’s thoughts on the relationships between ideology, hegemony, education, and curriculum. There isn’t much he presents in terms of contrast between the kind of curriculum that came before Ideology and what it was advocating. However, knowing how Apple thought about education and what his ultimate goals were, it’s possible to make sense out of some of the bizarre curriculum decisions we’ve seen in recent decades (a few are indicated below, but that is its own investigation). Apple’s contribution represents a modification of the purely economic terms that previous Marxists had emphasized into something that viewed cultural values and production as the essential cause of oppression and thus the essential battleground for the Marxists going forward. Critical Pedagogy is nearly fully formed at this point, the only task left would be to synthesize the Neo-Marxist practices of those like Apple with the spiritual vision of Paulo Freire. This synthesis was completed by the figure of the next chapter: Henry Giroux.
Prescriptions and Ideas for Education
Study of Experience
The term “study of experience” crops up when Apple begins a collaboration with those in the British New Sociology of Education movement. This movement was fundamentally Marxist in character, but ostensibly more grounded in observation through practices like “participant-observation” and “personal experience.” This movement didn’t do much on its own because, by its own admission it tended to get bogged down in details and “failed to offer a sophisticated analysis between personal experience and the structure of powerful institutions that help shape those experiences.”8
This was where Apple came in. On the surface, it seems like a valid task to take observations of individual children and classrooms and connect them to broader principles of education. But, as ever, Marxists go into the question sure they already have the right answer: oppression, oppression, oppression.
Apple’s Gramscian influence gave him slightly more nuance, but the fundamental goals and assumptions of his analysis are decidedly Marxian. His purpose in this “study of experience” was to identify the ways in which individual experiences observed in the classroom represent a way education helps to maintain Cultural Hegemony, and thus an oppressive society. More bluntly, he needed to figure out a way to make his oppression narrative robust enough to “explain” a variety of individual experiences. Gottesman documents a study of Apple’s in which he provides “a qualitative, structural analysis of how the experiences of [kindergarten] students are connected to broader social and economic life.”9 There’s no sense in which Apple enters this investigation with the purpose of discovering the nature of children or how they learn. Scholarship for him, is to come up with a way to fit the experiences of five-year-old children into his Gramscian worldview.
This represents a subtle, but important shift in the method of cognition that eventually becomes central to Critical Pedagogy and Critical Social Justice. It’s not simple indoctrination or propaganda that the critical theorists are going to rely on. They are going to redefine thinking as the process of twisting everything the mind encounters into something that supports and justifies their Marxian worldview. Consider DiAngelo’s formulation:
“The question is not “did racism take place”? but rather “how did racism manifest in that situation?”10
This isn’t as simple as throwing out the slogan “all white people are racist” as an explanation for anything (though this assumption is necessary for the whole project), it’s guidance for what a mind should be doing when it encounters a novel situation. It bears a superficial resemblance to actual thinking because it’s a process by which the mind makes connections, but because there are no rules of logic or proof, these connections range from simple sophistry to schizophrenic conspiracy. The only rule of such “thinking” is that it must be used to support the position that racism is omnipresent and worse than ever. This was the approach that Apple brought into education, not only in his own analyses, but also as a template for the essential cognitive act that students would be performing under the framework of Critical Pedagogy.
Curriculum and Hidden Curriculum
While we saw that Bowles and Gintis made the hidden curriculum central to their analysis of education, it was Apple who led the charge of repurposing the actual curriculum to counter what he saw as damage done by the hidden curriculum implemented by ideology of an oppressive society.
While the specific types of programs and changes to curriculum are left vague in Gottesman’s summary, a quote from Apple does give a general idea about the direction curriculum development will go after his ideas come to prominence:
“Can we illuminate the political and conceptual tools needed to face an unequal society in which they also live? The most fruitful way to begin this task is to document what their conceptual and political tools do now: Do they maintain a false consensus? How do they act as aspects of hegemony? What are their latent ideological functions?”11
For Apple, the first thing to do was elaborate on all the ways in which the current educational system plays a role in maintaining the ideological hegemony of an unjust society (naturally, this was where he seems to have spent a great deal of his energy). But the step after this is to retool educational curriculum in a way that struggles against this hegemonic control. Essentially what Apple wants the curriculum to do is constantly funnel conversations and thinking towards topics of politics, oppression, and activism.
The practice has become widespread enough that many schools throughout the country have adopted curricula built on this model. A somewhat prominent example can be seen in a Tennessee curriculum that is currently an exhibit for a lawsuit by Parents Choice Tennessee.12
The nearly 100 pages of second grade curriculum form a module on English/Language Arts that combines the topics of: conflicts between natives and settlers during the colonization of America, the specific stories of Ruby Bridges and Sylvia Mendez in desegregation, and the broader Civil Rights movement in America. All are relevant topics to the history of our country (though the connection to the subject of English language is more tenuous), and likely have a place in a student’s education, but the reason for combining these topics into a single module is unclear until you look at it through Apple’s framework.
The clashes during the Indian Wars and subsequent removal of native peoples to reservations primarily serves to bring up vocabulary and conversations relating to the oppression by the United States government with little need to consider how differences in cultural values can cause such conflicts or how these compared to the past wars of conquest between different cultures. The issue is made simple enough for second graders to understand: The United States oppressed the native peoples.
Jumping into the Civil Rights movement and stories of desegregation, the emphasis is on unfairness, injustice, and oppression of the status quo during the early Civil Rights era, rather than on seeing the Civil Rights movement as the logical progression of ideas from the Enlightenment, or as a fulfillment of the promises made by the Constitution of the United States and Emancipation Proclamation. Again, the curriculum completely sidesteps the historical complexity of understanding the causes of something like the American Civil rights movement and how it contrasts with other eras of history. Instead, everything is packaged into a message that second graders can easily understand: American society was unfair and oppressive to these people, and the solution is activism. Furthermore, the fact that it isn’t technically a history module gives cover to this deliberate exclusion of historical context and nuance.
Even a children’s book about Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the Harlem Renaissance is taken as an opportunity to introduce complex topics like “economic depression” in a way that casts it as a simple matter of wealth inequality (oppression of the have-nots by the haves).
Nowhere in this curriculum is the overt indoctrination we would expect to see in Soviet-style propaganda. What we have is a mishmash of possibly legitimate content presented in a way that fails to give a full, contextual account of history (possibly deliberately). Instead, it primes the students (particularly since they are so young) to see the world in terms of oppressor and oppressed, and to see agitation for social change as the way to resolve this oppression. This was what Michael Apple wanted curriculum to be able to do, and it’s in our schools today.
Jargon & Crossover Terms
Conflict
From his earliest academic works Apple has a borderline obsession with the idea of conflict and the ways that this concept should become central to a curriculum. In some ways, this focus on conflict harkens back to Marxist Conflict Theory which attempts to explain social and economic relations as ultimately arising due to conflict between the classes. However, it’s much broader for Apple, resembling more the Hegelian conception of a conflict between thesis and antithesis. In short, any important historical, intellectual, or social development can be understood as arising from a conflict between forces in society. In 1971 Apple wrote:
“There has been, so far, little examination of how the treatment of conflict in the school curriculum can lead to political quiescence and acceptance by students of a perspective on social and intellectual conflict that acts to maintain the existing distribution of power and rationality in society.”13 (Emphasis in original)
For Apple it’s not just that conflict is an omnipresent aspect in human developments, it’s the essential aspect driving things forward. And he wants to make sure that students see it this way. For Apple, political developments arise from conflicts between the powerful, not from new ideas that cause changes in political philosophy. Scientific advancements happen because of the conflicts between entrenched thinking and new theories, not from rigorous use of an appropriate method. Economic changes occur due to class conflict, not from advancements in technology or trade.
An example of this approach, taken from the 3rd grade English Language Arts curriculum documented in the aforementioned lawsuit, concerns the story of Galileo and his battle with the Catholic Church over his advocacy of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Does the curriculum discuss the vocabulary associated with the unique and amazing observations Galileo made? No, it focuses on the conflict with the church officials. Does the writing ask students to explain why Galileo was so convinced what he was saying was true? Of course not, it has students write about staying the course when confronting traditional ideas.
It's not that the conflict between Galileo and the church wasn’t present, it certainly was (as are many conflicts associated with momentous changes in history) it’s that this curriculum is presenting things as if the conflict is the only thing worth knowing about the situation. Again, this primes young students to think about the world in a certain way: to see conflict as the driver of human progress. Is it any wonder that this approach to education would churn out legions of eager activists who know next to nothing about the issues, but are willing to threaten the lives of Supreme Court Justices?
Domination/Alienation
It wouldn’t be Marxist thought if the concepts of “domination” and “alienation” weren’t used in a manner that borders on the compulsive. In direct quotes from Apple as well as Gottesman’s summary, the two words are nearly always paired together in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish. The summary given in The Critical Turn fails to give rigorous definitions of either of these terms, but the meaning and intent can be inferred from the context in which they are used.
In Classical Marxism, domination and alienation is something imposed by the capitalist class on those whom they oppress. Domination is the way in which the workers are forced to do the bidding of the capitalists because their options are constrained to such an extent that the only choice they have is to participate in the capitalist system where they sell their labor. The selling of their labor creates alienation or a feeling of being disconnected from the product of their labor. Alienation strips work of its inherent meaning and leads to the frustration of the working classes, which ultimately leads to a socialist revolution.
Apple takes the Neo-Marxist refinement of these ideas and imports them into education. Domination is the way in which those with power oppress those without it. In the Neo-Marxist narrative, they do this by creating certain types of cultural values that the powerful have privileged access to allowing full access to the Cultural Hegemony while those without those cultural values are excluded and oppressed (a simple example of this dynamic would be a cultural value like punctuality: the powerful [arbitrarily] decide that being on time for things will be important to them and they proceed to exclude those who do not share the value of punctuality). Alienation follows from domination in that the oppressed feel disconnected from a culture that has different values from them. It’s through realizing this alienation and domination that the oppressed become critically aware and demand revolutionary change for society.
Apple argues that the task of the critical educator is to identify and draw attention to the cultural values causing domination and alienation as a means of raising critical consciousness. As with all of Apple’s analysis, because he has drawn his conclusion in advance, he is able to point to a great many areas which have “dominating and alienating practices” in the field of education—a general rule of thumb is that if an educational practice connects in any way to an underlying cultural value, Apple will argue that it is a practice that causes domination and alienation.
Hegemony/Counter-Hegemony
Though these ideas are effectively just Gramscian concepts repackaged for education, it’s worth taking a moment to clarify what Apple means when he uses them and what they imply about his intended course of action.
The Gramscian concept of Hegemony can best be thought of as a sort of conspiracy that a culture imposes on the subconscious minds of the individuals in that culture. A “conspiracy” because Gramsci believed that the only point of this Hegemony is to maintain the culture and prevent a Marxist revolution from occurring. It is “subconscious” because there need not be any Hegemonic individual or political class that imposes these cultural values by decree. Hegemony comes from the fact that people in the culture generally value certain types of things: religious customs and traditions, familial relationships, certain types of art and entertainment, the stability of work and life routines, etc.
The Counter-Hegemony is the oppositional movement needed to overthrow the control of the current Hegemony. However, this movement must be explicit and targeted with the intent of either changing or destroying the cultural values that the Hegemony rests upon. In practice, a Counter-Hegemony involves sending intellectual agents into the institutions responsible for producing or reproducing the cultural values of a society with the intent of changing them into something that will enable Marxist ideas to become the new Hegemony. For example, the ideas of Critical Legal Studies (which were later critiqued and subsumed into Critical Race Theory) represent an attempt at forming such a Counter-Hegemony in the field of Law.
Apple is one of the main architects for how to accomplish this goal in American education and the prescriptions he has for education fundamentally serve this purpose.
Commonsense (Common Sense)
Motte: An evaluation of a situation or course of action based on perception of the circumstances or facts. Generally, common sense is understood to be more prudent than solutions or analyses that offer complex explanations or grand courses of action. Commonsense solutions usually arise from the way a default set of cultural values and norms handles problems.
Bailey: A label applied to unscrutinized norms and practices which reproduce oppression in the school system (and cultural institutions more broadly). Common sense is a primary justification that the Hegemony uses to maintain its control.
Strategy: As used by Michael Apple, common sense represents a strawman of the practice of modern education he is going to tear down. Apple argues that labels such as: “slow learners”, “poorly motivated” and “underachiever” are the “commonsense categories” in education. To the extent that these concepts are used at all in education, they represent a shorthand that educators use for students who have difficulty learning (and yes, this shorthand lacks nuance and can be unfair). Apple wants to make the claim that all common sense does is reproduce these unnuanced characterizations of students, which makes it more difficult for them to succeed. Ostensibly, the solution is to get rid of commonsense elements in education entirely. Teaching reading using phonics is common sense? It's out. Teaching standard algorithms for multiplication and long division is common sense? Gone. Exposing students to the achievements of Western literature, science, and civilization is common sense? Get rid of it. What’s happening here is that Apple has realized that many cultural values he seeks to uproot are operationalized through a culture’s idea of “commonsense.” If he can successfully attack common sense, he can prevent these values from being used to oppose his Gramscian Counter-Hegemony in education.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey: Unfortunately, a major weakness of common sense is that it is susceptible to these kinds of attacks. Because the many values are implicit in a culture, an appeal to commonsense may be used for lack of a coherent defense of those values. Commonsense solutions problems, to the extent they are valuable, often represent approaches that were discovered through trial-and-error but were never fully elaborated upon. The solution is to identify the underlying cultural values represented by common sense and defend them explicitly and strongly (if they are indeed justified). This means doing some work. We have to understand why the phonics method is better than the “look-say” method or Freire’s “dialogical method” for teaching literacy. We need to understand why the multiplication and division algorithms are required steps in learning math as opposed to jumping directly to methods of pseudo-mental math as advocated by Common Core. We must understand the value of reading the great works Western literature, understanding the scientific method, and knowing the achievements of Western Civilization.
Ideology
Motte: A set of ideas and prescriptions which forms the basis of an overarching view of existence, man’s place in existence, and what it means to pursue the good. When used with a negative connotation there is an implied sense in which ideological convictions are unshakable by evidence that does not conform to the ideology.
Bailey: A narrative that the powerful tell themselves and the rest of society to justify the possession and retention of the power they hold.
Strategy: Going back to Marx himself, the concept of ideology had two purposes. The first was to have a stock response to criticisms of Marxism or defenses of Capitalism: the speaker is revealing his ideological biases and can be safely ignored. In their view, anything that didn’t conform to Marxism was, by definition, ideologically driven, thus non-scientific, thus not based on evidence. In this sense, both the identity of the speaker (as a capitalist or some other holder of power) and the fact that the message was not Marxist were used as arguments against it. Essentially, it is a sort of Ad Hominem fallacy (the speaker is an oppressor so his argument is wrong) combined with a No True Scotsman fallacy (nobody who cares about evidence would argue based on “ideology”). The other aspect of the Marxist definition of ideology allows them to claim they have, by definition, the only worldview that is free of ideology. Since their worldview is (supposedly) not a narrative that justifies the continued use of power to oppress, Marxism is not an ideology, but rather a counter to ideology. In this sense, the Marxists are allowed to cash in on the negative connotation of the motte definition of ideology, while using the bailey definition to argue that their views are free of ideology.
Seize the Motte and Bomb the Bailey: The idea that Marxism (or Neo-Marxism, or any variants of Social Justice Marxism) is not ideological is, of course, absurd. It’s an abuse of language to redefine the term ideology in a way that tars any views counter to your own and neatly excludes your own convictions from criticism. This inevitably leads to abuses of power because once the Marxists gain control, they have no problem using every trick in the book to institutionalize their own ideological positions (even if they were railing against such tactics yesterday). All forms of Marxism constitute a worldview with very definite moral prescriptions that have proven unshakable even when those prescriptions have left millions of human beings dead. Not only is Marxism an ideology, it’s an ideology that embodies all the worst aspects of the term.
Questions
Question 1: When trying to put Apple’s formulation of Gramscian Marxism into my own words, I couldn’t help but think that it all sounded like a conspiracy theory: There’s this nefarious ideology that no one holds, yet everyone holds, and it has the purpose of blinding all of society to the fact that they could easily have a Utopia if they just had the right mindset. And the reason it does this is just so it can cruelly maintain its own power and control. On thinking about it a bit more, and hearing James Lindsay bring it up in different podcasts Classical Marxism wasn’t much different.14 Marx invented the ideology of “Capitalism” from whole cloth that was basically a strawman of a free-market economy driven by division of labor, then ascribed it to the “capitalists” who had accrued capital for the purpose of exploiting those whom they could coerce into working for them. But this can’t be the first time someone has conceptualized Marxism in this way, but I wonder if there are more detailed criticisms of Marxism as essentially being an elaborate conspiracy theory.
Question 2: After getting just the barest sense of Apple’s worldview, his educational prescriptions, and the almost deliberate way in which his writing obscures clarity, I have to ask the question: who read this stuff and said, “Yes, this is the way forward in education.”?
Thank you for reading my take on Michael Apple and the changes he brought to education. After seeing the connections of Michael Apple’s prescriptions to educational curricula being used in schools today, I’m particularly interested in learning about other examples of materials and lessons from schools where the implementation of these ideas is visible. Please comment below if you have anything like that!
Hicks, Stephen. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition). Expanded. Ockham’s Razor, 2011.
Gottesman, Isaac H. The critical turn in education: from Marxist critique to poststructuralist feminism to critical theories of race. p. 55 New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Robertson, Amy D., and W. Tali Hairston. “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study.” Physical Review Physics Education Research 18, no. 1 (March 11, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevphyseducres.18.010119.
TCTiE p. 62
Anti-racism handout 1 2016; https://www.robindiangelo.com/resources/attachment/anti-racism-handout-1-page-2016/
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/08/onlysubs-the-three-iron-laws-of-woke-behavior/
TCTiE p. 66
TCTiE p. 62
TCTiE p. 64
Anti-racism handout 1 2016; https://www.robindiangelo.com/resources/attachment/anti-racism-handout-1-page-2016/
TCTiE p. 68
https://parentschoicetennessee.org/legal
TCTiE p. 55
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/01/theology-marxism/
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/06/summary-neo-marxism/
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-cultural-marxism/