Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1725840 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Reading Apple is rather like taking part in an erudite conversation. One is stimulated, challenged, and educated and eager to talk back. This book, written with students and other collaborators, builds upon and extends Apple's formidable analysis of state/education relations and the politics of identity, subjectivity, and knowledge. Here these concerns are set in a global perspective with chapters from locations as diverse as Korea, Scandinavia, the U.S.A., and Polynesia, but without losing coherence or credibility. Wide-ranging, ambitious, and compelling, The State and the Politics of Knowledge is a considerable achievement, and important book.
–Stephen J. Ball, University of London

Reading Apple is rather like taking part in an erudite conversation. One is stimulated, challenged, and educated and eager to talk back. This book, written with students and other collaborators, builds upon and extends Apples formidable analysis of state/education relations and the politics of identity, subjectivity, and knowledge. Here these concerns are set in a global perspective with chapters from locations as diverse as Korea, Scandinavia, the U.S.A., and Polynesia, but without losing coherence or credibility. Wide-ranging, ambitious, and compelling, The State and the Politics of Knowledge is a considerable achievement, and important book.
–Stephen J. Ball, University of London

Scholars, educators, and activists searching for a serious and insightful book that weaves critical educational theory together with empirical and historical data, policy analysis, and a transnational focus will greatly appreciate what Apple and his co-authors have to say in The State and the Politics of Knowledge. By bringing powerful social theories into conversation with the complex and contradictory educational experiences in very diverse economic, political, and cultural contexts, Apple and his colleagues have begun to build the theoretical explanations needed to challenge and interrupt dominance.
–Amy Stuart Wells, Teachers College-Columbia University

This volume could not have arrived at a more important time. In a period in which critical scholarship on the state and education has all but atrophied, Michael Apple and his collaborators shed new light and sustained depth of insight on the complexity of state involvement in the organization of knowledge in educational institutions in the new millennium. Throughout, contributors to The State and the Politics of Knowledge offer lucidity, reflexivity, and illumination as they integrate theory, empirical details, and policy analysis in these absorbing accounts of state involvement in the educational enterprise. The State and the Politics of Knowledge is a landmark volume in a time when radical scholarship on educational issues is experiencing a recession of intellectual value, relevance, and influence. A volume of this sort is long overdue.
–Cameron McCarthy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

About the Author
Michael W. Apple is the John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has recently been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Educational Research Association and his book, Ideology and Curriculum (Routledge 1990), was voted one of the top twenty books on education in the twentieth century.