WebLog 3 - Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge?

Apple discusses quite a few “tensions” as they relate to education in his second chapter Whose Markets, Whose Knowledge?  Most of them were his way of analyzing the conservative social movements that he feels has a powerful impact on the practice of education in the United States.  These tensions include:

·         Education for employment – educating for specific fields and therefore not widening the educational materials to cover more subject areas.

·         Highly standardized and regulated teaching methods – this type of control over what we teach puts teachers in an extremely limiting role, not to mention the focus of those educational lessons being on passing the standardized tests. 

·         The “Christian Right” being a powerful and influential part of education as it relates to public policy in the media, religion, social welfare, ect.   This influences the gender roles and family, and Apple says this to be a “most dangerous force in a child’s life”.

 For my blog, I would like to focus specifically on his selection titled: “Neoliberalism: Schooling, Choice, and Democracy”  Where he points to tensions revolving around what he has set up as public schools vs. private schools.  Many of his statements go back to the Managerialism theory.  That public schools have become the “black holes” for which money is poured and then disappears.  He continues to say that public schools are looked at through a cost-benefit analysis.  Obviously if we are going to look at schools from a business standpoint, it would seem to make sense that money spent on schools needs to have an effective outcome.  So where is breakdown, and why is the outcome too often ineffective? 

In addition, the social classes of our society greatly affect these outcomes as well.  Poor people don’t choose to be poor, ect.  People who cannot afford private school education are stuck in their districts where the failure rate is so high.  So where is the “choice”?   He quotes that the only way for “the poor to gain the right to leave bad schools and seek out good ones is through an “unorthodox alliance”.”  That alliance being one with Republicans and Business – since those are the most powerful groups which are “supposedly” willing to transform the system. 

He further states that “depoliticization” is making it very difficult for people with low economic, political, and cultural power to be heard.  And if they are heard at all, they are often acted on in ways that do not “deal with the true depth of the problem. “

I think Apple did a good job of establishing what he feels are the contributing “tensions” to the problems with our modern educational system, however…now what?  I am interested to see how he suggests we “solve” these problems in his future chapters, or at the very least attempt to “smoothen out” these proposed tensions.