From Gouldner to Gramsci: The Making of Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum

Abstract

Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum, published in 1979, helped initiate a broad turn in the field of education in the United States to Marxist thought as a lens through which to analyze the relationship between school and society. This classic text continues to inform scholarship in the field. While Ideology has received considerable attention, less explored is Apple’s scholarship that precedes Ideology. Structured by a chronological reading of articles republished in Ideology, this historical essay sheds new light on Apple’s initial formulation of a critical approach to education. In particular, the essay reveals a significant shift in Apple’s Marxist influences, from the work of Alvin Gouldner, Trent Schroyer, and Jürgen Habermas in the first half of the 1970s to work in the British New Sociology of Education (NSE) and the ideas of Antonio Gramsci in the second half. In addition to illuminating our understanding of Apple’s thought and the history of the field, the essay suggests that reflecting on the intellectual history of the field can help us develop rigorous theory and nuanced analytical tools that enable us to critically examine the social order and push toward radical social change.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Nancy Beadie, Phil Bell, Danielle Endres, Jim Gregory, Debby Kerdeman, Jeremy Root, and the reviewers and editorial team for helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

Notes

1 Articles are not always published in the order in which they are written. Comments are made where there is a clear question of order. The one article turned chapter that is not discussed is “Curricular History and Social Control,” which Apple wrote with his student Barry Franklin (Apple & Franklin, ). The article became chapter four of Ideology. Unlike the other republished material, this historical piece—focused on early curricularists such as Bobbitt, Charter, and Thorndike—does not explicitly engage in a Marxian analysis of schooling. However, while not speaking to Apple’s shift to Marxist thought, it does speak to his interest in curricular history, which is also evident in Apple (). In many respects, the article is more reflective of Franklin’s dissertation than Apple’s earlier scholarship (Franklin, ). Notably, Habermas is substantively engaged in the dissertation.

Furthermore, while this essay engages some of Apple’s work that was not republished in Ideology it does not engage all of Apple’s work during the 1970s. Instead, the focus is on work that sheds light on Apple’s intellectual path, particularly with regard to his engagement with Marxist thought leading up to the publication of Ideology. Particularly notable is that this essay does not engage a few pieces published at the very end of the 1970s that are contemporaneous with Ideology, including an essay review covering the New Sociology of Education in Harvard Educational Review in 1978 (Apple, ) and a couple of pieces that were republished in Apple’s Education and Power ().

2 On the emergence of phenomenology in social theory in the United States, see Gross ().

3 Evidence of Marxist influence in his dissertation includes a brief discussion of Herbert Marcuse (Apple, , pp. 146–149) and some scattered comments on Marxist ideas about the sociology of knowledge (e.g., pp. 22–23).

4 For a discussion of Marx’s early writings, including the reception and publication of this work, see the introduction in Colleti (). For a sketch of the “critical” tradition underpinning the work of interwar dissident Marxists, see the chapter “Sketching the lineage: The critical method and the idealist tradition” in Bronner (). While many scholars use the term Western Marxism (e.g., Anderson’s classic book Considerations on Western Marxism) to describe 20th‐century Marxist thought that emerged outside the Soviet sphere of influence, and often in reaction to it (i.e., in the “West”), following Bronner (), Gouldner (), and others, the term critical is often used in this essay to identify a more specific tradition of Marxist thought. There have always been debates in Marxist circles about how to define currents in Marxist thought. This choice, intended for purposes of specificity, is certainly debatable.

5 There were numerous heated debates in radical, and especially Marxist, circles about ideas and political action during the 1960s and ’70s. Students for a Democratic Society, for instance, imploded as a result of these debates. For an insightful discussion of core arguments central to divisions in Marxist‐Leninist movements in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, see Elbaum (). For a general history of the 1960s with a strong grounding in the history of the New Left, see Isserman and Kazin ().

6 For a detailed account of Apple’s life from his time growing up in Patterson, New Jersey, through his time as a student at Teachers College listen to the first half of Sandy Pfahler’s three‐hour interview with Apple (Apple, ). While there is very little about the 1970s in the interview, the second half of the interview includes a riveting account of a visit to South Korea, a discussion of his relationship with Paulo Freire, and a range of general comments about his life and work that might be of interest to scholars.

7 A significant exception is a 1972 article in the Kappa Delta Pi journal Educational Forum (Apple, ). The piece draws from his dissertation research and is grounded in Schutz’s work.

8 A significant exception is an article published in in Nobuo Shimahara’s edited Educational Reconstruction: Promise and Challenge. Even here, however, while Berger and Luckman are drawn upon, the article, which draws on “The Hidden Curriculum,” argues for “the utility of accepting, if only partially, a Marxist interpretation of consciousness” (p. 179). The article appears to have been written in between “The Hidden Curriculum” and “The Adequacy.” Like “The Hidden Curriculum” it offers a strong critique of the field and ultimately advocates a Marxist approach. Unlike “The Adequacy” it does not begin to show what such an approach might look like.

9 For a discussion of the Socialist Scholars Conference, see Fischer (), which includes an essay by Schroyer about Habermas that was initially presented at the fifth annual conference in 1969. Apple may have met or become aware of Schroyer while he was taking coursework at the New School. Apple () suggests in his interview with Pfahler that he took a class from someone translating Habermas, something Schroyer undoubtedly did.

10 Huebner advocated a Marxist approach in Huebner ().

11 While there were numerous Marxists engaged in education politics in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and a few scholars outside of the field of education writing about education from a Marxist perspective, there was little explicit and sustained Marxian analysis in the field of education’s major journals. Four of the more notable exceptions all appeared in Harvard Educational Review: Freire (, ); Bowles (); and Gintis (). For a history of the reception of Freire’s work in the field in the 1970s, see Gottesman (). For a historical account of Bowles and Gintis’s educational scholarship in the 1970s, see Gottesman (in press).

12 Althusser (1970/2001) wrote: “To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses” (p. 98, italics original). Schools, as an ISA consisting of an “obligatory (and not least, free) audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist social formation, eight hours a day for five or six days out of seven,” were thus an especially important site of ideological control to understand (p. 105). Because Althusser argued that there was relative autonomy at the superstructural level, many education scholars initially believed that Althusser’s framework offered both a way to better understand the school as a repressive ideological institution as well as school as a space for potential resistance.

13 For a rich historical discussion of debates in British cultural Marxism about the ideas of Althusser and Gramsci, see Dworkin ().

14 In Ideology Apple cites the essay as it appeared in Dale, Esland, and MacDonald ().

15 Apple’s essay on Illich was originally published in Nobvo Kenneth Shimahara and Adam Scrupski’s edited book Social Forces and Schooling in . Like much of Apple’s other work during the first half of the 1970s it draws from Schroyer. There is no discussion of British cultural Marxist scholars in the essay.

16 In the mid‐ and late 1970s there was also a movement in Canada toward critical Marxism via British cultural studies. This conversation was centered at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, with Curriculum Inquiry playing a significant role. While Apple was more engaged with British scholarship than Canadian scholarship, Henry Giroux developed a strong relationship with Canadian scholars such as former Curriculum Inquiry editor Roger Simon. For further discussion of the critical turn in Canadian educational scholarship, see Livingstone & Contributors ().

17 A note on the bottom of the first page of the article claims that a deeper exploration of its contents will be present in Ideology and Curriculum.

18 The one curious claim in the blurb is an overstatement about the centrality of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Apple’s work. The dust jacket comment appears to be playing to a British audience that was engaged with Bourdieu’s ideas.

19 “On Analyzing Hegemony,” Ideology’s introduction/first chapter was published with the same title, though in abridged form, as the lead article in the first issue of The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (Apple, ). The acknowledgment section for article republication in Ideology makes no reference to the piece, which strongly suggests that it was written for the book and later paired down as an article.

20 The one chapter that does not mention Gramsci in the text or in a footnote (though the word hegemony is sprinkled throughout) is the chapter cowritten with Barry Franklin.