Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age

by Michael W. Apple

A powerful examination of the rightist resurgence in education and the challenges it presents to concerned educators, Official Knowledge analyzes the effects of conservative beliefs and strategies on educational policy and practice. Apple looks specifically at the conservative agenda's incursion into education through the curriculum, textbook adoption policies and the efforts of the private and business sectors to centralize its interests within schools. At the same time, however, he points out areas of hope for the future, showing how students and teachers have continued the struggle and are now successfully engaged in building more democratic education policies and practices. Finally, Apple writes in personal terms about his own teaching techniques and work with students which challenge some of the ideological and educational policies and practices of the Right.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1993

About the author

Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A former primary and secondary school teacher and past-president of a teachers union, he has worked with educators, unions, dissident groups, and governments throughout the world to democratize educational research, policy, and practice.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has changed the way I "read" education. For example, a recent New York Times article raised the seemingly innocuous question of what public schools were doing for their highest achievers in an age of preoccupation with raising overall proficiency. The article cited recent research by the Fordham Institute. Official Knowledge cautions its reader to question the institutions working to shape the debate on education reform, so I looked the Fordham Institute up. Sure enough, it was a conservative nonprofit think tank with an agenda: the reinstatement of large-scale tracking in public schools. Tracking has been abandoned for almost twenty years after an avalanche of research demonstrated that it encouraged de facto segregation. Connecting these dots, I returned to my reading of Official Knowledge, and of how Apple describes the political, cultural, and economic philosophies of the conservative restoration running through the veins of much education research and its conclusions. This book helps you understand the underlying motivations of en vogue education reform, and question their true goals.

Apple attempts to describe a conservative ideological alliance that is actively remaking American public education today. As an example of this, he describes how neoliberal institutions seek to reconceptualize “democracy” to mean the freedom of market-style choice. In such a model, the citizen is reformed as a consumer. Thus, reforming schools means applying the market rules to public education and allowing schools to compete for students. Unsurprisingly, this movement supports voucher and charter movements, and is obsessed with using supposedly objective standardized tests as a means of classifying and stratifying our students into “high” and “low” flyers. In this mechanistic view of school, students are parts to be fashioned for the machinery of the economy; the sooner we can separate the widgets from the lug nuts, the better. He goes on to describe how neoliberal goals align with the values of neoconservatives and authoritarian populists, as well as a new managerial class that serves to carry out the measuring and accountability such a system demands.

The book is not perfect. Apple's goal is construct a grand narrative of how American education arrived at its current state rather than linger too long in the nitty gritty of case studies. When empirical evidence is produced, he focuses on what I would consider to be sideshow targets--the history of state textbook adoption policies, or the rise of Channel 1 for example, rather than, say, examples of how Texas-approved textbooks whitewash curriculum and deskill teachers. In these cases, we're expected to take his word for it.

Nonetheless, the book is remarkable in its prescience. Despite the second edition being written at the turn of the millennium, Apple correctly forecasts the rise of standardized testing as the arbiter of students' "progress" and identifies the conservative alliance advancing an ever-encroaching accountability and market-based "choice" culture that shifts blame for students' performance from socioeconomic conditions to teachers and the students themselves. History has proven many of Apple's theories correct, and makes Official Knowledge well worth reading for anyone interested in education.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a digital copy so I couldn't throw it across the room when Apple named things I've felt as a teacher for a decade. Ch.6 especially. So true it hurt. Tight control and audit culture leading to deskilling of the profession and "intensification".

[Sammy Hwang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a must-read for people who want to know how and why education can be a political, economic, and cultural battle field.
Also, technology can add complexity, not solution if we do not use new technology without caution. One of the best books that I read this year.
Insightful and inspirational.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read this for class, but it is amazingly interesting how we decide who should learn what and what knowledge is left out of our lives

[Mandy]

Reading for my Curriculum class...it's very good!