The State and the Politics of Knowledge Book

Formal education, by and large, is organized and controlled by the government. This means that by its very nature the entire schooling process - how it is paid for, to who chooses the textbooks and to even who has the right to answer these questions - is political. A powerful critical analysis of past and current efforts to use education for political purposes-liberal conservative-tState and the Politics of Knowledge offers compelling portraits of the role education plays in struggles over colonialism, nationalism, religion, class, gender and sexuality. Not only do we learn how politics informs educational policy and knowledge, Apple turns the question around and asks how education can be used in the service of fostering democratic and socially critical policies and connecting these policies to broader social movements. Apple answers this question with an international perspective, refining our ideas about the state and education, and finds critical, empirical, historical and practical tools, as well as examples of how these tools might be used effectively to form collective political action. Based on Apple's previous criticisms of dominant attempts to reform education, State and the Politics of Knowledge describes how to interrupt this dominance and create truly democratic and realistic alternatives to the ways markets, standards, and testing are now being forced onto schools.Read More