Hegemony

Hegemony in its original sense denoted the domination of one nation over another. However, its more complex and more common meaning is associated with the work of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. His concept of cultural hegemony speaks to how one social group maintains domination over another social group. In the field of curriculum studies, hegemony in this sense has been used to explore and explain the role of various curricula in ensuring the domination of White, middle-class, heterosexual, and male worldviews.

In trying to figure out why the workers' revolution predicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had not occurred, Gramsci proposed the concept of cultural hegemony to explain how—in a diverse society—one social group maintains domination over another social group. Key to Gramsci's theory is the idea that domination is maintained not simply by force (i.e., military might), but primarily through power, or the ability of the dominant group to persuade the subordinate group to adopt its values, beliefs, and ideas. In other words, the dominant group must use ideological persuasion to gain the consent of the subordinate group. In an advanced capitalist society, the primary ways in which the values, beliefs, and ideas of the dominant group are circulated and reinforced are through mass media and schooling. Because it is so widely and so readily circulated, the dominant ideology is assumed to be neutral and thus has a powerful impact on shaping everyday common sense. Hegemony is thus achieved when the majority of the subordinates accept the dominant ideology as the way things are and as such think and act in ways that are consistent with the status quo.

In educational studies, the concept of hegemony has been central to critical analyses that—despite the rhetoric around equal educational opportunity—argue that schools actually work to reproduce society's existing power relations. At the same time, there has been much critique and elaboration on the critical role of ideology and how it is that the masses come to accept and/or reject the values, beliefs, and ideas of the dominant social group. The assumption that the masses are simply duped into accepting the ideology of the dominant social group or class has been challenged by a [Page 432]number of more sophisticated analyses that look at—for instance—student resistance as a way of rejecting the dominant ideological perspectives communicated via the official school curriculum, the ways in which the dominant social group connects its ideological agenda to the lived experiences of people as a way to redirect popular will in their favor, and the idea that hegemonic order as well as social change depend on a combination of reproductive and democratizing forces and that schooling is central in relaying—despite their contradictions—both scripts.

In the field of curriculum studies, considerations of hegemony hinge on the idea that the knowledge conveyed through various curricula is not neutral or disinterested; it raises questions of what knowledge gets included, how that knowledge is transmitted, and whose interests are being served by such knowledge. Efforts to understand curriculum as one of the primary apparatuses through which ideological consensus is worked on via schooling has provoked a proliferation of meanings for the concept of curriculum, including official curriculum, hidden curriculum, null curriculum, curriculum as difference, lived curriculum, and informal curriculum, among others. Scholarly endeavors in the field also speak of hegemony in more than capitalist class terms; there is also significant focus on the impact of race, gender, and sexuality on the power relations that work toward and/or against the current hegemonic order. In addition, there has been a growing body of work where curriculum studies intersects with cultural studies to consider the role of mass media and popular culture in maintaining and/or disrupting the current hegemonic order.

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