Challenging neo-liberalism,building democracy: creating the Citizen School in Porto Alegre,Brazil

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 policies. We describe and analyse the policies of the ‘Popular Administration’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We specifically focus on the ‘Citizen School’ and on proposals that are explicitly designed to radically change both the municipal schools and the relationship between communities, the state and education. This set of policies and the accompanying processes of implementation are constitutive parts of a clear and explicit project aimed at constructing not only a better school for the excluded, but also a larger project of radical democracy. The reforms being built in Porto Alegre are still in formation, but we argue that they have crucial implications for how we might think about the politics of education policy and its dialectical role in social transformation.     

Away with all teachers: The cultural politics of home schooling

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 of educational problems are multiple: teacher education institutions produce teachers who are unprepared academically and unskilled in teaching the 'basics'; state funded (public, in the US sense of the word) schools have been taken over by 'progressive' models of teaching that are unworkable; these same schools do not teach 'traditional' cultural and religious knowledge, beliefs, and values; and public schools do not listen to conservative parents and are much too bureaucratic. Supporters of home schooling are usually religious fundamentalists who have increasing power in the USA and elsewhere. They have formed a national coalition and have joined in a tense rightist hegemonic alliance with neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, an alliance that seeks to reconstruct our common-sense about education and about all things social. The article shows how the movement toward home schooling has become more extensive and more dangerous than has usually been thought. In the process, home schooling is situated within the larger conservative and authoritarian populist ideological, religious, and social movements that provide much of its impetus. Connections are suggested with other protectionist impulses and connections are made to the history of and concerns about the growth of activist government. Finally, the article points to how it may actually hurt many other students who are not home schooled.     

Reframing the Question of Whether Education Can Change Society

Among the most important questions critical educators can ask today are the following: Can schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do? These questions provide the basis for this article by Michael Apple, as well as for the books under discussion here. The books by David Blacker, John Marsh, Mike Cole, and Pauline Lipman discussed in this essay are either Marxist, have been influenced by Marxist and socialist ideas, or are published by presses that have a long history of publishing material with a Marxist and/or socialist orientation. In order to adequately deal with them, Apple devotes much of this essay to a set of arguments about the possibilities and limits of these ideas. After specifying those arguments, he discusses how they are developed in the books themselves. He grounds this discussion in a call for creating a broader “we” that is based on a more historically grounded understanding of the ways in which struggles over schooling actually can make a difference.     

Field theory and educational practice: Bourdieu and the pedagogic qualities of local field positions in educational contexts

Bourdieu’s version of field theory has had an impressive impact on the ways that sociologists of education conceptualize educational practices. These accounts tend to focus on the varying levels of ontological complicity established between students’ cultural dispositions and educational institutions. In this paper, the wisdom of these accounts is acknowledged but it is also suggested that Bourdieu’s field theory does not go far enough to detail the ways that positions in local educational fields embody pedagogic qualities and action trajectories. Drawing on insights from social psychology and relational sociology, a field theory for local educational action is outlined that more adequately accounts for the ways that students and educators directly experience and act upon curricular and pedagogic qualities in educational settings. An empirical example is then offered of the authors’ claims within the context of curricular tracking/streaming, and the article concludes by considering the practical and political consequences of this theoretical shift.     

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' actually is. I also argue that we cannot fully answer the question of whether schools can 'create a new social order' unless we unpack the relations of outside to inside, of what constitutes the inside, and especially of what the specific power relations are both within what Bernstein calls 'the symbolic field' and between it and 'the field of production' and the 'field of the state'. Of particular importance here is the notion of the 'pedagogic device', Bernstein's apparatus for demonstrating the specific cultural configuration that enables us to uncover 'why things stay the same' and how they might be different. For Bernstein, the issue became not only explaining change, but also explaining what he saw as the remarkable stability and similarity of education among different political economies. I use as an example the pedagogic device in one specific nation and demonstrate how we can employ it to more rigorously focus our attention on the possible effects education itself has.     

The automation of curriculum development using the Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM) system

The Authoring Instructional Materials (AIM) program is a set of software tools for curriculum design and maintenance for use in the Navy. Several Navy test sites are conducting cooperative development and testing of the AIM software. This paper describes the rationale for the AIM system, the development process and products, and some possibilities for further development.