Tributes to Jean Anyon

For my colleague and friend

I first met Jean Anyon at a University of Wisconsin–Madison American Educational Research Association reception in the early1980s. This began a close to 30-year friendship that spanned decades of our own work and critical changes in the national and global context. A warm and generous person, she impacted on many, and I am one of them. I often introduced her, and found myself both enamoured and star-struck by the breadth and depth of her scholarship, and simultaneous deep commitment to social justice – to righting the world just a bit, as we catapulted into the intensifying inequalities that increasingly define us. To Jean’s credit, she never gave up. Through deep scholarly investigation, she worked to articulate exactly what was happening with respect to the growing disenfranchisement of the poor and working class, while ultimately offering concrete possibilities towards meaningful radical movement to contest the encroachment of power and ever-deepening inequalities. As she made clear, such moves on the part of power are conscious and deliberate – moves to enhance opportunities for the privileged while cutting off such opportunities for those with less. She continued this important work until her untimely death in 2013.

Since the late 1970s Jean Anyon’s writing/work sits at the very centre of a scholarly movement to unpack the nature of what later is called the ‘official curriculum’: what it is; how it comes to attain this status; and whom it serves. Spurred by calls in England in the early 1970s for a ‘new sociology of education’, scholars began to address questions related to what constitutes official knowledge and the ways in which such knowledge is differentially distributed through schools.

While excellent theoretical and conceptual work has been done in this general area, Jean Anyon was among the first to empirically engage this set of issues. Her three articles on official knowledge and its distribution – published in Harvard Educational Review (Anyon 1979), Curriculum Inquiry (Anyon 1981b) and Interchange (Anyon 1981a) – are undeniably classics in the field. Her early work on ideology and US history textbooks (Anyon 1979) makes concrete Michael F.D. Young’s (1971) contention that there is a dialectical relationship between access to power and the opportunity to legitimate dominant social categories; in this case, knowledge related to appropriate mechanisms for bringing about economic change. Her two 1981 articles focus on the ways in which knowledge is distributed differentially across schools that serve students of varying social class. This work empirically affirms and extends Bowles and Gintis’s (1977) earlier argument that the everyday actions/activities of schools serve to socialize students into highly differentiated future places in the labour force. These early papers are unparalleled in their scholarly impact, setting the stage for a corpus of work on social class and schooling. Jean Anyon went on to break important ground in related scholarly areas, particularly as linked to urban education, wherein Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education and a New Social Movement (Anyon 2005) and Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (Anyon 1997) are widely considered seminal.

But Jean was not content simply to be a theorist who works off impeccable empirical material, no matter how noteworthy her scholarly products. She desired to go beyond critical scholarship to offer a vision of how we can mobilize the political will for structural intervention in inner-city life and schooling. Her early and thoroughly revised editions of Radical Possibilities (Anyon 2005, 2014) are exemplary in this regard. There are few texts that integrate research, policy and practice, and both versions of Radical Possibilities stand as testament to the intellectual and political reach of this extraordinary woman.

In Jean’s more than 40-year career, she has been catalyst to new and long-lasting conversations on race, social class, political economy, and education. She has also been my close friend, and I, like so many others, will miss her greatly.

In 1979 I received a sharp note from Jean Anyon about the use of sexist language in a book Michael Young and I had edited on the sociology of the school curriculum (Whitty and Young 1976). It marked the beginning of an ongoing academic dialogue and an enduring friendship. We shared interests not only in the sociology of education, but also in social studies teaching and teacher education.

By the time Jean came to England in 1982 to speak at the annual sociology of education conference in Birmingham, I was leading the urban education programme at King’s College London and I invited her to visit us. The work she was doing at that time on social class and school knowledge figured prominently in our programme and it soon began to be read and discussed more widely in England (Anyon 1980, 1981). As a result, she jokingly referred to me as her ‘British agent’.

There was a great deal of common ground in the sorts of analyses of urban education we offered at that time, but we had lively discussions whenever we met, often about the strengths and limitations of political economy or neo-Marxism as tools for the analysis of education. She took seriously and responded to the critique I offered of her work in my 1985 book Sociology and School Knowledge (Whitty 1985). I questioned the extent of correspondence between education and the economy, and we explored together the role and significance of contradiction and relative autonomy in our respective analyses.

Jean’s best-known book, Ghetto Schooling (Anyon 1997), was more influential in England than its empirical focus on New Jersey might have suggested. This was probably because her characterization of the relationship between race and class gave the book more resonance with English analyses than was typical of US writing on race and education. Her message about the need to link educational reform to economic and political transformation was also more widely accepted over here.

Neither of us fully embraced the ‘culturalist turn’ in the sociology of education, but Jean stuck more firmly than I did to political economy. In many ways she was vindicated by the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath. However, by that time her book Radical Possibilities (Anyon 2005) and her work with students at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (Anyon et al. 2009) demonstrated an appreciation of the range of social movements and change strategies that might need to be involved in building a new social movement to challenge the status quo and recapture what she called ‘the revolutionary spirit of democracy’.

Her work was probably at its most influential when she died. So whenever, in recent years, younger colleagues and students have asked me whether I know Jean Anyon’s work, I have taken some considerable pride in saying that I have known it – and knew her – for well over 30 years.

Jean Maude Anyon, who died on 7 September 2013 aged 72, was a brilliant, creative thinker and an inspiration to students of the sociology of education. She was, until the end, active in her scholarly but political work with her doctoral students in urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. She had moved her focus from an analysis of education and social class to developing what she called ‘a new paradigm for educational policy analysis and activism’.

I last saw Jean at the CUNY Graduate Center a year ago (at the time of writing) when she was intimately involved with her graduate students’ concerns. I have had more recent correspondence with her about her contributions to my forthcoming book (David 2014). It was in answer to my questions about her professional life that I came to understand her intimate and passionate concerns as an activist, first and foremost. Indeed, she quoted a Berthold Brecht poem at the bottom of her email signature to illustrate this:

Those who take the meat from the table

Teach contentment.

Those for whom the taxes are destined

Demand sacrifice.

Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry

Of wonderful times to come.

Those who lead the country into the abyss

Call ruling too difficult

For ordinary folk.

I was in awe of her superb critical analyses of the class-based developments of school knowledge through American educational textbooks well before I met her. These had been published in the USA and reproduced in the United Kingdom through the Open University in the early 1980s. I was somewhat afraid to talk with her when we were first introduced at an American Educational Research Association annual meeting almost 20 years ago in New Orleans. What could I say that would not sound unctuous? In fact I found a modest and friendly woman, with a sharp mind and acerbic wit.

I quickly became involved in a loose network of researchers who became known as education feminists linked together through our meetings at the American Educational Research Association. This was an international group of like-minded women doing scholarly work around issues of our passionate political concern. We met together for dinner on an at least annual basis to share concerns and develop a supportive network that would help to make our work feel more collaborative and less marginal to the mainstream. Jean was absolutely central to this group, initially working closely with Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, and gradually with others such as the Canadian academic Jane Gaskell, and later Wendy Luttrell who eventually became a close colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center. Jean displayed the same supportive collegiality to other researchers as mentor to students.

Whilst Jean saw herself as a socialist–feminist she came from a background of labour organizers in the factories of the northeastern Unites States, as she put it to me. She started out studying ‘pre-med’ but decided to switch to American history as she found ‘pre-med’ was too apolitical. Perhaps it is best to quote her own words about her intellectual trajectory:

I was always a Marxist/Socialist. And then during the 1970s, when the US women’s movement was strong, I became a feminist and left my husband for graduate school … my work doesn’t focus on women; it focuses on macro-economic structural/regulatory framework that constrains the lives and opportunities of women and people of color. (Personal correspondence)

She went on to comment on the growing encroachment of neo-liberalism in women’s lives, concluding that, ‘as the renowned feminist Hester Eisenstein would put it, feminism has been “seduced” by corporate models of action, belief, and goals. Socialist feminism has lost out to this seduction’. She wanted to ensure that we avoided, at all costs, the seductive nature of these corporate models and developed a close critique of our working relationships and institutional forms, including higher education.

Every spring semester, I teach a class on the relationship among knowledge, power, and education. We begin with reading some of the most well-known books on how education reproduces relations of dominance and subordination, and then move on to material on the politics of interruption and to the importance of social movements along multiple axes of power (see also Anyon et al. 2009) in creating and filling the spaces of interruption. Among the final things to which we pay serious attention are my own new book Can Education Change Society? (Apple 2013) and Jean’s compelling treatment of counter-hegemonic movements in Radical Possibilities (Anyon 2005, 2014).

Jean’s book never fails to excite students. It provides them with hope instead of the sometimes all-too-prevalent sense of powerlessness. Radical Possibilities stimulates a very different conversation in the class – stories of their own involvement in similar movements; seeing themselves not only as ‘researchers’ but as ‘public intellectuals’ and scholar/activists. And it provides a perfect pairing with my discussion of the tasks and risks of the critical scholar/activist in Can Education Change Society? Without her powerful discussion of progressive social movements, students may be much less able to see their roles as actors within larger historical traditions and movements.

The fact that I repeatedly refer to Jean’s work in my own efforts to understand the power of the Right and to construct alternatives to it demonstrates to me once again that all of our efforts are collective. There is no doubt in my mind that my understanding both of how this power operates and of the ways in which the intersections of class and race produce such frightening consequences in this society is funded by Jean’s insights and actions over the decades of our friendship.

Yet let us remember that Jean was not satisfied with ‘bearing witness to negativity’. For example, I had answered the question of whether education could change society by focusing on the creative ways the Right had incorporated and used education as part of its larger project of radically transforming our common-sense (Apple 2006), and urged us to learn lessons from the Right’s ability to transform society. Here again, Jean was our teacher. She demonstrated the transformative power of progressive mobilizations and also focused on what we could learn from these movements in ways that again gave hope. The new second edition of Radical Possibilities (Anyon 2014) will undoubtedly make her aim here even more visible.

During the last stages of Jean’s courageous battle with cancer, Wayne Au and I were finishing the table of contents of a four-volume set of books called Major Works in Critical Education (Apple and Au, in press). It was clear to us that Jean had to be there. But that was the easy part. As we began re-reading her work, we faced a very difficult decision. There were so many of her contributions that could/should be represented – in urban education, critical educational and social theory, the politics of knowledge and the curriculum, social movements, and the list goes on. This dilemma again brought home to us something all of Jean’s colleagues and friends may already know but perhaps take for granted – the range of her contributions, the ground-breaking studies, the ability to make crystal clear what was happening and what was at stake if we did not act back, on even who the ‘we’ was.

That she did this with such humanity and courage reminds us as well that while she may not be physically present, her efforts live on in all of us who continue to ask the kinds of questions to which she devoted her life – and who demand that we act on the world to make it a more equal place.

Geoff Whitty
Director Emeritus, Institute of Education, University of London, UK
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Geoff Whitty
Lois Weis
University at Buffalo, NY, USA
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Lois Weis
Miriam E. David
Institute of Education, University of London, UK
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Miriam E. David
Michael W. Apple
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Michael W. Apple

Acknowledgement

Portions of this tribute are drawn, with permission, from the author’s recent essay published in Perspectives on Urban Education, volume 11, number 1: http://www.urbanedjournal.org/

This tribute is drawn from a longer version published in Perspectives on Urban Education, volume 11, number 1: http://www.urbanedjournal.org/archive/volume-11-issue-1-winter-2014