M W Apple
Biographic Data
| ID | 11495 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M W Apple |
| GIVEN NAMES | M W |
| FAMILY NAME | Apple |
| SIGNATURE | APPLE M W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8459-8238 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 150 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 643 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 150 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
STEM Education and the Contradictory Realities of School Policies
STEM Education Reform in Urban High Schools critically examines the reality of STEM at a school level in the United States. In essence, its fundamental questions include: What actually happens in schools—and especially to students—when STEM becomes the prime focus? What happens to STEM itself? Given the intense pressures on schools, does STEM often become largely rhetorical? When there are different results, what structures, resources, and commit…
Sites of Educational Conflict
Books for and in schools are commodities. They form a central part of the political economy of publishing. They are also, profoundly, sites of cultural and ideological conflict. While always there, there are periods when these economic and ideological conflicts are even more powerful. This is just such a time. This reality asks us to also examine places in school buildings that might (often wrongly) seem to some people to be “less important.” Amo…
On the Role of Teacher Unions in Social Justice
In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communities, and the larger society. The importance of such a commitment and what it actually looks like is…
Reconstructing choice
This article examines a new trend of high school choice in China – parental choice of emerging international high-school curriculum programs (IHSCPs) recently established by Chinese elite public high schools. We add to the existing critical literature on school choice by providing a detailed empirical analysis of why, how, and under what conditions Chinese parents with high socio-economic status choose a particular IHSCP. Drawing on Pierre Bourdi…
The politics of reading textbooks
(2020). Beyond the western horizon: Rethinking education, values, and policy transfer. In Fan, G., & Popkewitz, T.S. (Eds.), Handbook of Education Policy Studies. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8347-2_1[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), but which I use here in a very different sense
Religion, Cultural Politics, and Public Knowledge
Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries and the topic of this essay, museums. Creating the Creation Museum clearly documents why such sites are w…
STEM, Educational Transformation, and the Politics of Race
Reflections on contemporary challenges and possibilities for democracy and education
This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar–activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with co…
Aliança conservadora na educação brasileira
Entrevista com Michael W. Apple
Perigos Ocultos
Neste ensaio, o curriculista norte-americano Michael W. Apple problematiza as investidas atuais de grupos conservadores às políticas educacionais, sobretudo aquelas voltadas à educação domiciliar/homeschooling, em meio à pandemia da COVID-19. Ao longo do texto, sustenta-se uma reflexão acerca de alguns "perigos" político-epistemológicos e seus efeitos no cenário educacional contemporâneo que, a priori, segundo o autor, não estão sendo discutidos …
Test Scores, Identities, and Cultural Possibilities
In my Reviewing Policy section of this journal I have often analyzed a number of significant books that focus on other nations. Such an international agenda is important. Analytically such a wider perspective provides fresh insights into the lenses we employ to understand crucial sets of social relations that are created by and create educational and larger dynamics. This international view has now taken a very interesting turn with the publicati…
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
On Doing Critical Policy Analysis
In my comments on this fine collection of critical policy analyses, I want to do a number of things. I shall point to the general conceptual and social orientation and commitments that provide the foundation for such research. I will then describe a number of contributions that these papers make. And finally, I shall suggest a number of areas where additional critical investigations could make a significant contribution to our understanding. I ho…
Ideology and Curriculum
The politics of curriculum reforms in Asia
In recent decades, nations across Asia have gone through – indeed are going through – massive social, economic, and political transitions (Bell & Li, 2013; Chua, 2010; Lim & Apple, 2016). Governed
The Struggle for Democracy in Critical Education
O texto aborda os desafios que atualmente se fazem presentes para a construção da democracia na educação. É apontada a necessidade de que se busque duas disposições para que a democracia possa ser vivida: que haja um reposicionamento, ou seja, que o mundo seja visto sempre pela perspectiva dos despossuídos; e que o mundo seja visto de forma relacional, ou seja, que se busque sempre analisar e entender as relações de poder e as contradições que es…
The Culture and Commerce of the Texbook
The industry remains perilously poised between the requirements and restraints of commerce and the responsibilities and obligations that it must bear as a prime guardian of the symbolic culture of the nation. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell recognize the influence of profit, the power of what they call commerce, in text production. While the text dominates curricula at the elementary, secondary, and even college levels, very little cri…
Fighting for the local
What is Present and Absent in Critical Analyses of Neoliberalism in Education
In Can Education Change Society? (Apple, 2013), I describe a number of tasks in which the critical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening in the
Dialogue, field, and power
Piketty, social criticism, and critical education
Thomas Piketty’s volume Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty 2014) is one of those rare academic books that become a public phenomenon. Partly a case of sponsored mobility and partly a genu
Official knowledge
1. Introduction: The Politics of Official Knowledge 2. The Politics of Common-sense: Why the Right is Winning 3. Cultural Politics and the Text 4. Regulating Official Knowledge 5. Creating the Captive Audience: Channel One and the Political Economy of the Text 6. Whose Curriculum is This Anyway? (with Susan Jungck) 7. Hey Man, I'm Good! The Art and Politics of Creating New Knowledge in Schools 8. The Politics of Pedagogy and the Building of Commu…
El Docente/Activista
Es un artículo para la comprensión de una trayectoria vital comprometida. Mike Apple hace un relato biográfico acerca de cómo ha llegado a ser el docente activista que es. Esta narrativa comienza en el momento que él se incorpora a la Facultad de Educación, como estudiante. Ahonda en sus raíces familiares y su contexto inicial para seguir el camino hasta la actualidad. Describe su trayectoria en primera persona y proporciona un mirada desde dentr…
Elite rationalities and curricular form
While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedagogic codes, this paper depicts how one of the most high-status forms of school knowledge – critical t…
Educación y poder
Comparing Neo-liberal Projects and Inequality in Education
In this article, I pay particular attention to some of the most important dynamics surrounding globalisation in education—the increasingly powerful discourses and polices of neoliberalism concerning privatisation, marketisation, performativity, and the 'enterprising individual'. While I demonstrate the truly international effects of neo‐liberal policies—and the differential realities they tend to produce in real schools—I also suggest that we can…
The Text and Cultural Politics
The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one …
Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education
The Absent Presence of Race in Educational Reform
It would not be possible to fully understand the history, current status, and the multiple effects of current educational policy in either the UK or the US without placing ‘race’ as a core element of one's analysis. Arguing that race is a social construction, this essay examines the ways race may function as an absent presence in discussions of markets and standards. It argues that critical analyses in education devote considerably more attention…
What Do Schools Teach
One of the least attractive arguments in recent years has been that schools are relatively unexciting, boring, or what have you, because of mindlessness (Silberman 1970). The argument has it that schools covertly teach all those things that humanistic critics of schools so like to write and talk about-behavioral consensus, institutional rather than personal goals and norms, alienation from one's products, etc.-and that they do so because teachers…
Democratic education in neoliberal and neoconservative times
Given the increasing power of neoliberal and neoconservative agendas in education internationally, critically democratic policies and practices are now even more important. Yet, one of the major problems with critical work in education has been the fact that some of the academic leaders of the ‘critical pedagogy’ movement and of critical and democratic education in general in many nations have not been sufficiently connected to the actual realiti…
Reimagining the new pedagogical possibilities for universities post-Covid-19
Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their worl…
Markets, Standards, Teaching, and Teacher Education
Market-based approaches to teacher education are growing internationally. There are concomitant moves to create uniformity and a system of more centralized authority over what counts as important teacher skills and knowledge. These kinds of reforms are overtly meant to help. Each is closely connected to the larger arena of education, where momentous ideological transformations are underway. The possible hidden effects of these efforts can be unde…
Power, Meaning and Identity
The sociology of education in the US is extremely varied in its theoretical and methodological tendencies, its visions of what research is for, and its political sensibilities. This article describes a number of the most interesting recent developments within critically‐oriented sociology of education in the US. It pays particular attention to work on the politics of meaning. It discusses representative examples within the sociology of curriculum…
Teachers and Texts
Global Crises, Social Justice, and Teacher Education
When the U.S. government released its 2007 census figures in January 2010, it reported that 12% of the U.S. population- more than 38 million people-were foreign born. First-generation people were now one out of every eight persons in the nation, with 80% coming from Latin America and Asia. This near-record transformation, one in which diasporic populations now constitute a large and growing percentage of communities throughout the nation and an e…
The cultural politics of borrowing
In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis‐and‐success narrative of British education reform to de‐territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching practices and legal framework that currently afflict Japanese education. In so doing, the Japanese conse…
Challenging neo-liberalism, building democracy
In this article, we situate the processes of educational policy and reform into their larger socio-political context. We describe the ways in which a set of policies has had what seem to be extensive and long lasting effects because the policies are coherently linked to larger dynamics of social transformation and to a coherent strategy that aims to change the mechanisms of the state and the rules of participation in the formation of state polici…
The Politics of Official Knowledge
(1993). THE POLITICS OF OFFICIAL KNOWLEDGE: Does a National Curriculum Make Sense? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-16
Away with all teachers
In the United States and a number of nations, one of the most powerful dynamics of educational 'reform' involves the movement toward home schooling. The national media have spoken glowingly about it and the number of children being schooled at home is growing rapidly. In large part, this is stimulated by the circulation of anti-statist discourses and by the continuation and expansion of claims about school failure. In these accounts, the sources …
You Don’t Have to Be a Teacher to Teach This Unit
Given the increasing power of conservative movements in the larger society, there is considerable pressure currently not only to redefine the manner in which education is carried out, but to redefine what education is actually for This has had a major impact on teachers’ autonomy and the definition of what counts as a skill. We argue that teaching is a specific kind of labor process, one that is currently being subject to rationalization, deskill…
Spatializing critical education
Recently critical scholars have shown a renewed interest in spatial relations in educational contexts. In this essay we use selections from Gulson and Symes's edited volume Spatial theories of education as a point of departure to examine what spatial analysis can contribute to the critical education traditions. We argue that, when done thoughtfully, spatial theory can shed new light on existing and taken-for-granted social relations in education,…
Education and new hegemonic blocs
Discussions of higher education need to be placed within larger processes of socio-economic and cultural restructuring. While higher education does indeed have its own specific histories and its own relatively autonomous dynamics, the entire sphere participates in and is connected in complex ways to social transformations and to struggles over power. The author examines these larger transformations that are changing the very landscape on which hi…
Reflections on contemporary challenges and possibilities for democracy and education
This paper is one of two which bring together leading educational researchers to consider some of the key challenges facing democracy and education during the twenty-first century, including rising social and economic inequality, political instability, and the existential threats of global pandemics and climate change. In this paper, key educational scholar–activists respond to the challenges and possibilities for democracy and education, with co…
What is Present and Absent in Critical Analyses of Neoliberalism in Education
In Can Education Change Society? (Apple, 2013), I describe a number of tasks in which the critical scholar/activist needs to engage. Among them are telling the truth about what is happening in the
Elite rationalities and curricular form
While much of the critical scholarship around elite schooling has focused on the students who attend elite institutions, their social class locations, privileged habituses and cultural capital, this paper foregrounds curricular form itself as a central mechanism in the (re)production of elites. Using Basil Bernstein's conceptual framework of pedagogic codes, this paper depicts how one of the most high-status forms of school knowledge – critical t…
Theory, Research, and the Critical Scholar/Activist
Can critical education interrupt the right
This article examines the ways in which the complex and at times contradictory project of ‘conservative modernization’ has altered the terrain of education. It extends the arguments I make in Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006) about understanding the ‘right’, about the possibilities of interrupting the right in education, and about our roles in assisting in the building of workable alternatives. It proposes a number of tasks of the critical scholar…
American Teachers
Does Education have Independent Power? Bernstein and the question of relative autonomy
In this article, I focus on some of the ways Basil Bernstein's positions can help us understand the question of the relative autonomy of the school and of the 'class belongingness' of its cultural dynamics. In the process, I show how this differentiation of various social fields of power and of the complex ways in which class relations work within them enables a considerably more subtle perspective on 'who controls what' and on what that 'what' a…
The hidden curriculum and the nature of conflict
Community, Knowledge, and the Structure of Disciplines
Politics and National Curriculum Policy
(1977). Politics and National Curriculum Policy. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 7, No. 4, pp. 355-361
[What Do Schools Teach?]
Michael Apple, Philip Jackson, Roger Woock, Norman Bauer, Dwayne Huebner, [What Do Schools Teach?]: Discussion, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4, Curriculum Theorizing since 1947: Rhetoric or Progress? (1977), pp. 361-369
What Do Schools Teach
One of the least attractive arguments in recent years has been that schools are relatively unexciting, boring, or what have you, because of mindlessness (Silberman 1970). The argument has it that schools covertly teach all those things that humanistic critics of schools so like to write and talk about-behavioral consensus, institutional rather than personal goals and norms, alienation from one's products, etc.-and that they do so because teachers…
Beyond Good and Evil
Philip Jackson, Dwayne Huebner, Michael Apple, [Beyond Good and Evil: Observations on the Recent Criticism of Schooling]: Discussion, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4, Curriculum Theorizing since 1947: Rhetoric or Progress? (1977), pp. 331-340
Politics and National Curriculum Policy
Michael W. Apple, Politics and National Curriculum Policy: An Essay Review of Documents from the N. I. E.'s Curriculum Development Task Force, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1977), pp. 355-361
Ideology and Curriculum
Curriculum and Reproduction
Critical Reviews
Analyzing Determinations
Both Basil Bernstein (1977) and Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), among others, have argued that the organization of knowledge, the form of its transmission, and the assessment of its acquisition are crucial factors in the cultural reproduction of class relationships in industrial societies. That is, curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation are not to be seen as neutral artifacts or activities. Instead, they need to be interpreted as in p…
Teachers, Ideology and Control
Curricular form and the Logic of Technical Control
Because of the current crisis in the accumulation process, within the last few years there have been significant attempts in many industrialized countries to influence the educational process directly in ways that will meet the needs of capital accumulation. However, while such overt attempts at capitalist intrusion into education are important, the logic and ideology of capital have entered into schools in more subtle ways. This article analyzes…
State Bureaucracy and Curriculum Control
Ideology and Curriculum
Ideology and Curriculum
Cultural and Economic Reproduction in Education
Ideology and Curriculum
Preface to the 25th Anniversary Third Edition Preface to the Second Edition 1. On Analyzing Hegemony 2. Ideology and Cultural and Economic Reproduction 3. Economics and Control in Everyday School Life (with Nancy King) 4. Curricular History and Social Control (with Barry Franklin) 5. The Hidden Curriculum and the Nature of Conflict 6. Systems Management and the Ideology of Control 7. Commonsense Categories and the Politics of Labeling 8. Beyond I…
Common Curriculum and State Control
(1982). COMMON CURRICULUM AND STATE CONTROL. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 1-10
Curriculum and the Labor Process
It is becoming very clear that pace of state and industrial intrusion into education is increasing.' Neither side of Atlantic has been immune to pressures to bring schools more closely into line with needs. In England Great Debate and Green Paper -both of which were part of a strategy to have governmental educational policy from elementary schools to universities correspond more closely to ideological and manpower requirements of industry-stand a…
Education and Power
Interpreting Teaching
Education and Power
Politicizing "Civic Values" in Education
The Political Economy of Text Publishing
Sociology (133 works) · Political science (118 works) · Law (96 works) · Politics (79 works) · Pedagogy (60 works) · Law (57 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (49 works) · Social science (49 works) · Epistemology (40 works) · Psychology (40 works)