Cultural Politics and Education

Book excerpt: Michael Apple offers a powerful analysis of current debates and a compelling indictment of rightist proposals for change. Apple presents the causes and effects of further integrating schools into the corporate agenda, as well as current calls for a national curriculum and national testing, privatization and voucher plans, and fundamentalist religious pressures to censor textbooks. He demonstrates who will be the winners and losers culturally and economically as the conservative restoration gains in strength, bringing with it an even greater restratification of knowledge and students in terms of race, class, and gender.