Neo-Marxist Research

Neo-Marxist curriculum studies is a field of inquiry concerned with the complex connections between broad, economic structures and inequalities and the everyday production of school knowledge. Often called the “new sociology of education,” neo-Marxist research in curriculum studies explores how class inequality is “naturalized” through the school curricula. That is to say, it is concerned with how official school knowledge or curricula is complicit in the reproduction of class inequality. The earliest, most important work in this field emerged from the United Kingdom (e.g., the work of M. F. D. Young, Geoff Whitty, and Basil Bernstein) [Page 605]and France (e.g., Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron) during the mid-1970s before becoming more pronounced in the United States during the 1980s (e.g., Michael Apple and Jean Anyon). ...