Ideology and Curriculum

Michael Apple's Ideology and Curriculum is a foun-dational text in the new sociology of education and in curriculum studies more broadly. In particular, Apple's Ideology and Curriculum interrogates the connections between economic and social reproduction and everyday school life and curricular knowledge. Although considering a range of oppressions, Ideology and Curriculum focuses largely on the reproduction of economic inequality. In this regard, Apple's book was one of the earliest and most prominent examples of neo-Marxist curriculum theory in the United States, largely setting the stage for a generation of scholars interrogating the links between social reproduction and the curriculum.

Perhaps the most lasting and enduring contribution of Ideology and Curriculum has to do with the interrogation of curricular knowledge. As Apple made clear, curricular knowledge does not stand outside of existing power structures and relationships. That such knowledge typically appears neutral or disinterested only underscores its particular force and power. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, Apple highlights the ways in which ideology, hegemony, and selective tradition work to produce certain forms of legitimate knowledge in school settings. By ideology, Apple refers to the ways distinct political agendas and ideas are linked together to create broader and more cohesive explanatory mechanisms. In Ideology and Curriculum, Apple focused on the ideological press for new forms of standardized management and control in school life. These ideological forms saturate everyday life in schools, including through the proliferation of legitimate forms of knowledge.

Such ideologies work to maintain what Apple (drawing on Gramsci) called hegemony. As opposed to more coercive forms of social control, hegemony works to legitimate existing forms of power through [Page 461]the production of common sense. In Ideology and Curriculum, Apple discusses the role of the curricula in maintaining existing, hegemonic social relations. For example, he discusses the ways social conflict is elided from existing school life in favor of more seamless narratives of social cohesion. Here, as well, a seemingly neutral scientific curriculum is favored over and above one that engages in social and economic conflicts, including those around social class. For Apple, structural economic inequality is naturalized, made to seem immutable—just the way things are. School knowledge is a key site where this common sense is produced.

School knowledge is also a product of what Apple calls (following Williams) selective tradition. That is to say, the school curriculum reflects only certain kinds of knowledge and not others. When one sees the curricula as selective, Apple demonstrates, one sees it as the product of invested actors, situated in particular social, cultural, and economic contexts. Knowledge does not simply fall from the sky. As Apple argues, when one sees the curricula as selective, one must explore the political implications of knowledge selection and transmission. In years to come, Apple would extend this focus on the so-called official curriculum to explore the range of ways in which the curricula work to benefit certain groups and interests and to marginalize others.

Ideology and Curriculum highlighted the ways school life is saturated by hegemonic forces. Although the focus was largely on the curricula, he also stressed the ways teachers, researchers, and other educative agents worked to normalize this technical approach to school life. In particular, he looked at the proliferation of particular, remedial-izing categories and labels and how the field of education sorts young people by and through categories and labels such as slow learners, under-achievers, and so on. These categories and labels are deployed in the service of technical rationality—used to sort young people by so-called ability to seemingly maximize the school's resources most efficiently. As Apple argues, these categories and labels work as part of a self-perpetuating cycle, perpetrating inequality in the service of seemingly neutral, clinical, or remedializing ends.

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