Curriculum and the Labor Process: The Logic of Technical Control

Author(s): Michael W. Apple

Source: Social Text, No. 5 (Spring, 1982), pp. 108-125
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466338
Accessed: 05/10/2009 01:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Text.

http://www.jstor.org
 Curriculumand the LaborProcess:
The Logic of Technical Control
MICHAELW. APPLE

INTRODUCTION

It is becoming very clear that the pace of state and industrialintrusioninto education is
increasing. Neither side of the Atlantichas been immuneto the pressuresto bringschools more
closely into line with "economic needs." In England the Great Debate and the Green Paper
-both of which were partof a strategyto have governmentaleducationalpolicy fromelementary
schools to universities correspondmore closely to the ideological and "manpower" require-
ments of industry-stand as remarkablestatementsto the abilityof capitalin times of economic
crisis to marshallits forces. In the United States, where governmentalpolicies are more highly
mediatedby a different articulationbetween the state, the economy, and schools, this kind of
pressure exists as well. Often the workings of industry are just as visible. Chairs of Free
Enterprisedevoted to economic education are being founded at universities throughoutthe
nation. Programs-such as the Ryerson Plan-have been established by some of the major
corporationsto have teacherswork with corporatemanagementduringthe summerso thatthey
may lear "the true story of Americanbusiness and . . . carrythe message to theirstudentsand
their fellow teachers."2The movement to "teach for the needs of industry"has grown rapidly
enough to requirea clearing house, appropriatelynamedthe Institutefor ConstructiveCapital-
ism, established at the University of Texas to make materialmore available.3
We should not minimize the importanceof such attemptsat influencing teachers and stu-
dents. However, by keeping our focus only on these overt efforts at bringingschool policy and
curriculuminto closer correspondencewith industrialneeds andideologies, we may neglect what
is happeningthatmay be just as powerfulat the level of day-to-dayschool practice.In essence, I
wantto arguethatideologies arenot only global sets of interests,things "imposed" by one group

MICHAEL W. APPLE is professorof Curriculumand Instructionin the School of Education,the Universityof Wisconsin-
Madison.He is the authorof Curriculumand Ideology and, most recentlyCulture,Class and the State, bothpublishedby
Routledge and Kegan Pane.
This essay expandson commentspublishedin theJournalof Economicand IndustrialDemocracy, August 1981. It is
based on a larger analysis in Michael W. Apple, Culture, Class and the State: Reproductionand Contradictionin
Education (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). I would like to thankJean Brenkman,Michael Olneck, Philip
Wexler, and Geoff Whitty for their comments and criticisms on previous drafts.
2 "The
RyersonPlan:A TeacherWorkLearnProgram,"Chicago:JosephT. RyersonandSon, Inc., no date. I wish to
thank Linda McNeil for bringing this materialto my attention.
3 See, for
example, Diane Downing, "Soft Choices: Teaching Materials for Teaching Free Enterprise," Austin,
Texas: The Institutefor ConstructiveCapitalism, The University of Texas, 1979, mimeo.

108
Curriculumand Labor 109

on another. They are embodied in our common sense meanings and practice.4If we want to
understandideology at work in schools, we shouldlook as muchat the concreteof elementsday-
to-daycurricularandpedagogic life as at the statementsandplansof spokespersonsof the stateor
industry.5
I am not implying that the level of practice in schools is fundamentallycontrolledin some
mechanistic way by private enterprise. As an aspect of the state, the school mediates and
transformsan arrayof economic, political, and culturalpressuresfrom competing classes and
class segments.6 Yet we tend to forget that this does not mean that the logics, discourses, or
modes of controlof capitalwill not have an increasingimpacton everydaylife in our educational
institutions,especially in times of "the fiscal crisis of the state."7This impact, clearly visible in
the United States (thoughit is becoming more prevalentin EuropeandLatinAmericaas well), is
especially evident in curriculum,in the actual materialthat studentsand teachersinteractwith.
In this essay, I will be particularlyinterestedin curricularform,not curricularcontent. My
focus will not be on what is actually taught, but on the mannerin which it is organized. As a
numberof Marxist cultural analysts have argued, the workings of ideology can be seen most
impressively at the level of form as well as what the form has in it.8
In order to understandpart of what is occurring in the school and the ideological and
economic pressures being placed upon it, we need to refer to certain long term trends in the
capital accumulationprocess and see its relationto changes in the laborprocess. Recently these
trendshave intensified and have had a rathermajorimpact on a variety of areas of social life.
Among these trends we can identify certain tendencies such as:
the concentrationandcentralizationof capitals;the expansionof labourprocessesthatarebasedon
production-linetechnologiesandformsof control;thecontinuing declineof "heavyindustry"andthe
movementof capitalinto modem"lighter"formsof production,most notablythe productionof
consumerdurables; andmajorshiftsin thecomposition of labourpower-the seculartendencyto "de-
skilling,"the separationof "conception"from"execution"andthe creationof new technicaland
controlskills,theshiftof labouroutof directproductionandintocirculation andthe
anddistribution,
expansionof labourwithinthe state.9

4
RaymondWilliams, Marxismand Literature(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Michael W. Apple,
Ideology and Curriculum(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
5 This is not to deny the importanceof analyzing official documents, especially those producedby the state. For an
excellent example of the power of discourseanalysis, for instance, in unpackingwhatthese documentsmean anddo, see
James Donald, "Green Paper:Noise of a Crisis," Screen Education 30 (Spring 1979), 13-49.
6
For a more extensive discussion of this, see Michael W. Apple, Culture, Class and the State: Reproductionand
Contradictionin Education (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982). Furtheranalyses of the relationshipbetween
education, the state, and class dynamics can be found in Roger Dale, "Educationand the CapitalistState:Contributions
andContradictions"and MartinCamoy, "Education,Economy andthe State," both of which are in MichaelW. Apple,
ed. CulturalandEconomicReproduction
in Education:
EssaysonClass,IdeologyandtheState(Boston:Routledgeand
Kegan Paul, 1981).
7 James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1973).
8 See for
example, FredricJameson, Marxismand Form (Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress, 1971) and Michael
W. Apple, "Ideology and Form in CurriculumEvaluation," in George Willis, ed. QualitativeEvaluation (Berkeley:
McCutchanPublishing Corp., 1978), pp. 495-521.
9 John Clarke, "Capital and Culture:The Post War WorkingClass Revisited," in John Clarke, Chas Critcherand
RichardJohnson, eds. WorkingClass Culture:Studies in History and Theory(London:Hutchinson, 1979), p. 239. See
also HarryBraverman,Labor and MonopolyCapital (New York:MonthlyReview Press, 1974) and Michael Burawoy,
"Toward a MarxistTheory of the LaborProcess: Bravermanand Beyond," Politics and Society 8 (number3-4 1979),
247-312.
110 Apple

The development of new forms of control, the process of deskilling, the separationof
conception from execution, are not limited to factories and offices. These tendencies intrude
moreand more into institutionslike the school. In orderto unpackthis, we shall have to examine
the natureof the logic of corporatedeskilling and control.

DESKILLINGAND RESKILLING

In corporateproduction,firmsbuy the capacityone has to do workand, obviously, will often

seek to expandthe extractionof thatlaborto makeit moreproductive.Thereis an oppositeside to
this. With the purchaseof laborpower goes the "right" to stipulate(withincertainlimits) how it
is to be used, without too much interferenceor participationby workersin the conception and
planningof the work.10How this has been accomplishedhas not stayed the same, of course.
Empirically,there has been a changing logic of control.
Three kinds of control have been employed to help extract more work-simple, technical,
and bureaucratic.Simple control is exactly that, simply telling someone that you have decided
what should go on and they should follow or else. Technicalcontrolsare less obvious. They are
controlsembeddedin the physical structureof yourjob. A good example is the use of numerical
controltechnology in the machine industry,where a workerinsertsa card into a machineand it
directs the pace and skill level of the operation. Thus, the worker is meant to be simply an
attendantto the machine itself. And, finally, bureaucraticcontrol signifies a social structure
where control is less visible since the principlesof controlareembodiedwithin the hierarchical
social relationsof the workplace. Impersonaland bureaucraticrules concerningthe directionof
one's work, the proceduresfor evaluatingperformance,and sanctionsand rewardsare dictated
by officially approvedpolicy. l Each of these modes of controlhas grown in sophisticationover
the years, though simple controlhas tendedto become less importantas the size and complexity
of productionhas increased.
The long period of experimentationby industryon the most successful modes of controlling
productionhas led to a numberof conclusions. Ratherthan simple controlopenly exercized by
supervisors or persons in authority (and hence open to subversion by blue or white collar
workers),powercould be "made invisible" by incorporatingit into the very structureof the work
itself. This has meant the following things. The control must come from what seems to be a
legitimate overall structure.It must be concernedwith the actual work, not based on features
extraneousto it (like favoritismand so on). Perhapsmost importantly,the job, the process, and
the product should be defined as precisely as possible on the basis of management's, not the
worker's, controlover the specializedknowledge neededto carryit out. 12This often entailedthe
developmentof technical control.
Technicalcontroland deskilling tend to go handin hand. Deskilling is partof a long process
in which labor is divided and then redividedto increaseproductivity,to reduce "inefficiency,"
and to control both the cost and the impact of labor. It usually has involved taking relatively
complexjobs (mostjobs are much more complex andrequiremore decision-makingthanpeople
give them credit for), jobs which require no small amount of skill and decision-making,and
breakingthem down into specified actions with specified results so that less skilled and costly
10RichardEdwards,ContestedTerrain:The Transformationof the Workplacein the TwentiethCentury(New York:
Basic Books, 1979), p. 17.
Ibid, pp. 19-21.
12Ibid,p. 110.
Curriculumand Labor 11

personnelcan be used or so thatthe controlof workpace andoutcomeis enhanced.The assembly

line is, of course, one of the archetypicalexamples of this process. At its beginnings, deskilling
tended to involve techniques such as Taylorism and various time and motion studies. Though
these strategiesfor the division and controlof laborwere less thantotally successful (and in fact
often generateda significant amountof resistanceand conflict),13they did succeed in helping to
legitimate a style of control based in large part on deskilling.
One of the more effective strategies has been the incorporationof control into the actual
productiveprocess itself. Machineryin factories is now often designed so that the machinistis
called upon to do little more than load and unload the machine. In offices, word processing
technology is employed to reduce labor costs and deskill women workers. Thus, management
attemptsto controlboth the pace of the work and the skills required,to moreeffectively increase
their profit margins or productivity. Once again, as the history of formal and informal labor
resistancedocuments,this kind of strategy-the buildingof controlsinto the very warpandwoof
of the production process-has been contested.'4 However, the growing sophistication by
managementand state bureaucratsin the use of technical control proceduresis apparent.'5
When jobs are deskilled, the knowledge that once accompaniedthem, knowledge that was
controlled and used by workers in carrying out their day-to-day lives on their jobs, goes
somewhere. Managementattempts(with varyingdegrees of success) to accumulateand control
this assemblageof skills andknowledge. It attempts,in otherwords, to separateconceptionfrom
execution. The control of knowledge enables managementto plan; the worker should ideally
merely carrythese plans out to the specifications, and at the pace, set by people away from the
actual point of production.
But deskilling is accompanied by something else, what might be called reskilling. New
techniquesare requiredto run new machines;new occupationsare createdas the redivision of
labor goes on. Fewer skilled craftspersonsare needed and their previous large numbers are
replacedby a smaller numberof technicians with different skills who oversee the machinery.
This process of deskilling and reskilling is usually spreadout over the landscapeof an economy
so it is ratherdifficult to traceout the relationships.It is not often thatyou can see it going on at a
level of specificity that makes it clear, since while one group is being deskilled anothergroup,
often separatedby time and geography, is being reskilled. However, one particularinstitu-
tion-the school-provides an exceptional microcosmfor seeing these kinds of mechanismsof
control in operation.Given the relatively autonomousnatureof teaching (one can usually close
one's door and not be disturbed)and given the internalhistory of the kinds of control in the
institution(paternalisticstyles of administration,often in the U.S. basedon genderrelations),the
school has been partiallyresistantto technical and bureaucraticcontrol, at the level of actual
practice, until relativelyrecently. This "relative autonomy"may be breakingdown today.16For
just as the everyday discourse and patternsof interactionin the family and in the media are

13 See David Noble, America

by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York:
AlfredA. Knopf, 1977) andBurawoy, op. cit. I have reviewed a good deal of the literatureon resistanceat the workplace
in Apple, Culture, Class and the State, op. cit., especially Chapter3.
14
Stanley Aronowitz, "Marx, Bravermanand the Logic of Capital," The InsurgentSociologist 8 (Fall 1978), 126-
146.
s1 Edwards,op. cit.
16Dale, op. cit.
112 Apple

increasinglybeing subtly transformedby the logic and contradictionsof dominantideologies,'7

so too is the school a site where these subtle ideological transformationsoccur. As we shall see,
these logics of control can have a ratherprofoundimpact on day-to-dayschool life.

CONTROLLINGCURRICULARFORM

The best examples of the encroachmentof technical control proceduresare found in the
exceptionally rapid growth in the use of prepackagedsets of curricularmaterials. It is nearly
impossible now to walk into an Americanclassroom, for instance, without seeing boxes upon
boxes of science, social studies, mathematics,and reading materials("systems," as they are
sometimes called) lining the shelves and in use.18A school system purchases a total set of
standardizedmaterial,usually one which includes statementsof objectives, all of the curricular
contentand materialneeded, prespecifiedteacheractions and appropriatestudentresponses, and
diagnostic and achievement tests coordinatedwith the system. Usually, these tests have the
curricularknowledge "reduced" to "appropriate"behaviorsand skills. This emphasison skills
will become rathersignificant later on in my discussion.
Let me give one example, actuallytakenfrom one of the betterof the widely used curricular
systems, of the numerous sets of materialsthat are becoming the standardfare in American
elementaryschools. It is takenfromModuleOne of Science: A Process Approach.The notionof
module is importanthere. The material is prepackagedinto cardboardboxes with attractive
colors. It is divided into 105 separatemodules, each of which includesa set of pregivenconcepts
to teach. The material specifies all of the goals. It includes everything a teacher "needs" to
teach, has the pedagogicalsteps a teachermust take to reachthese goals alreadybuilt in, and has
the evaluation mechanismsbuilt into it as well. But that is not all. Not only does it prespecify
nearly all a teacher should know, say, and do, but if often lays out the appropriatestudent
responses to these elements as well.
To make this clear, here is one sequence taken from the material which lays out the
instructionalprocedure, student response, and evaluative activity. It concerns colors.
As each child arrivesat school, fasten a red, yellow, or blue paperrectangleon the child's shirtor
dress . . . Commenton the color of the paperand ask the child to say the nameof the color he or she is
wearing . . .
Put thirtyyellow, red, and blue papersquaresin a large bag or small box. Show the childrenthree
paperplates; one markedred, one yellow, and one blue. (See Materials for suggestions on marking.)
These colors should closely matchthose in the bag. Ask the childrento come forward,a few at a time,
andlet each child takeone squarefromthe bag andplace it on the platemarkedwith the matchingcolor.
[A pictureof this with a child picking out paperfroma box andputtingit on a plate is insertedherein the
materialso thatno teacherwill get the procedurewrong.] As each child takes a colored square,ask him
to name the color of that square. If the child hesitates, name it for him.'9

17 See Todd Gitlin, "Television's Screens:

Hegemony in Transition," in Apple, ed. Culturaland EconomicRepro-
duction in Education, op. cit., and Todd Gitlin, "Prime Time Ideology: The Hegemonic Process in Television
Entertainment,"Social Problems 26 (February1979), 251-266. Philip Wexler's work on the "commodification" of
intimatesocial relationsis importanthere. See especially his Critical Social Psychology (Boston: Routledgeand Kegan
Paul, in press).
18This is not only an Americanphenomenon.The foreign subsidiariesof the companieswho publishthese and similar
materialsare translatingand marketingtheirproductsin the thirdworld and elsewhere. In many ways it is similarto the
culturalimperialismof Walt Disney Productions.See, for example, Ariel Dorfmanand ArmandMattelart,How to Read
Donald Duck (New York: InternationalGeneral Editions, 1975).
19Science ... A Process ApproachII, InstructionalBooklet:ModuleOne (Lexington:Ginn andCo., 1974), pp. 3-4.
Curriculumand Labor 113

In the curricularmaterial, everythingexcept the bag or box is included-all the plates and
colored paper. The cost is $14.00 for the plan and the paper.
I noted thatnot only were the curricularand pedagogicalelements prespecified,but all other
aspects of teachers' actions were includedas well. Thus, in the "Appraisal"of this module, the
teacher is told to:
Askeachof six childrento bringa boxof crayonsandsittogether... Askeachchildto pointto his
redcrayonwhenyousaythewordred.Repeatthisforallsix colors.Askeachchildto matchonecrayon
withonearticleof clothingthatsomeoneelse is wearing. . . Beforeeachgroupof childrenleavesthe
activity,ask eachchildindividuallyto nameandpointto the red, blue, andyellowcrayon.20
Even with this amountof guidance, it is still "essential" thatwe know for each child whether
he or she has reached the appropriateskill level. Thus, as the final element, the materialhas
competencymeasuresbuilt into it. Here the specificationreachesits most exact point, giving the
teacherthe exact words he or she should use:
Task1: Showthe childa yellowcubeandask, Whatis the colorof thiscube?
This is done for each color. Then, after arrangingorange, green, and purplecubes in front of a
child, the materialgoes on:
Task4: Say, Putyourfingeron the orangecube.
Task5: Say, Putyourfingeron the greencube.
Task6: Say, Putyourfingeron the purplecube.21
I have gone on at length here so that you can get a pictureof the extent to which technical
control enters into the life of the school. Little in what might be metaphoricallycalled the
"production process" is left to chance. In many ways, it can be considered a picture of
deskilling.
My point is not to argueagainstthe specific curricularor pedagogicalcontentof this kind of
material,thoughan analysis of this certainlywould be interesting.22Rather,it is to have us focus
on the form itself. What is this doing? The goals, the process, the outcome, and the evaluative
criteriafor assessing them aredefined as precisely as possible by people externalto the situation.
In the competencymeasureat the end of the module, this extends to the specificationof even the
exact words the teacher is to say.
The process of deskilling is also at work here. Skills that teachers used to need, that were
deemed essential to the craft of working with children-such as curriculumdeliberationand
planning, designing teaching and curricularstrategiesfor specific groups and individualsbased
on intimate knowledge of these people-are no longer as necessary. With the large influx of
prepackagedmaterial,planningis separatedfrom execution. The planninginvolves the produc-
tion of the rules for use of the materialand the materialitself. The execution is carriedout by the
teacher. In the process, what were previouslyconsideredvaluableskills slowly atrophybecause
they are less often required.23

20
Ibid, p. 7.
21 Ibid.
22
See, for example, my analysis of science curriculain Apple, Ideology and Curriculum,op. cit.
23
I do not mean to romanticizethe past, however. Many teachersundoubtedlysimply followed the textbooksbefore.
However, the level of specificity and the integrationof curricular,pedagogical, and evaluativeaspects of classroom life
into one system (and the reductiveemphasison competencyand behaviors)is markedlydifferent.The use of the system
brings with it much more technical control of every aspect of teaching than previous text-boundcurricula.Obviously,
some teacherswill not follow the system's rules. Given the level of integration,though, it will be much more difficult to
114 Apple

But what aboutthe element of reskillingwhich is essential to understandinghow ideological

forms can penetrateto the heart of institutions like the school? Unlike the economy where
deskilling and reskilling are not usually found operatingat one and the same momentwith one
and the same people, in the school this seems to be exactly the case. As the proceduresof
technicalcontrolenterinto the school in the guise of pre-designedcurricular/teaching/evaluation
"systems," teachersare being deskilled. Yet they are also being reskilledin a way that is quite
consequential. We can see signs of this at teachertraininginstitutions,in inservice workshops
and courses, in the journalsdevoted to teachers, in fundingand enrollmentpatterns,and not the
least in the actualcurricularmaterialsthemselves. While the deskillinginvolves the loss of craft,
the ongoing atrophyof educationalskills, the reskillinginvolves the substitutionof the skills and
ideological visions of management.The growthof behaviormodificationtechniquesand class-
room managementstrategies and their incorporationwithin curricularmaterial and teachers'
repertoiressignify these kinds of alterations. As teachers lose control of the curricularand
pedagogic skills to large publishing houses, these skills are replacedby techniques for better
controlling students.
This is not insignificantin its consequencesfor bothteachersand students.Since the material
is often organizedaroundspecified outcomes and proceduresand these are built into this kind of
materialitself (with its many worksheets and frequenttests), it is "individualized" in many
ways. Studentscan engage in it themselves with little overt interactionon the partof the teacher
or each otheras they become moreused to the procedures,which areusuallyhighly standardized.
The students'progressthroughthe system can be individualized,at least accordingto speed;and
this focus on individualizingthe speed (usually throughworksheets and the like) at which a
student proceeds through the system is becoming even more pronouncedin newer curricular
systems. Since the control is technical-that is, managementstrategiesare incorporatedinto the
pedagogical/curricular/evaluative "machinery" itself-the teacherbecomes somethingof man-
ager. This is occurring at the same time that the objective conditions of his or her work are
becomingincreasingly"proletarianized"due to the curricularform's logic of technicalcontrol.
As the literatureon the laborprocessremindsus, the progressivedivision andcontrolof labor
also has an impactat the level of social relations,on how the people involved interact.As in the
workplace, the impact may have contradictoryresults in the school. With the increasinguse of
prepackagedcurricularsystems as the basic curricularform, virtually no interactionbetween
teachers is required. If nearly everything is rationalizedand specified before execution, then
contact among teachers about actual curricularmattersis minimized.24
If such technicalcontrol is effective, thatis, if teachersactuallyrespondin ways thataccept
the separationof planning from execution, then one would expect results that go beyond this
"mere" separation.One would expect, at the level of classroom practice, that it will be more
difficult for teachers to jointly gain informalcontrol over curriculardecisions because of their
increasing isolation. If everything is predetermined,there is no longer any pressing need for

ignoreit since many such systems constitutethe core or only programin the entireschool or district.Thus, accountability
to the next grade level or to administratorsmakes it harderto ignore. I shall returnto this point later on.
24This may be similarto what happenedin the early mills in New England,when standardizedproductionprocesses
drasticallyreducedthe contactamong workers.See Edwards,op. cit., p. 114. A recentstudyby AndrewGitlin, however,
points out that in some settings interactionincreasesbut it is always over the technical questionsraisedby the material.
Thus, issues of organizationalefficiency take precedenceover otherconsiderationsdue to the constraintsof the curricular
form itself. See AndrewGitlin, "Understandingthe Workof Teachers," unpublisheddoctoraldissertation,Universityof
Wisconsin, Madison, 1980.
Curriculumand Labor 115

teacherinteraction.Teachersbecome unattachedindividuals,divorcedfromboth colleagues and

theiractualwork. However, and here is partof what I mean by a contradictoryeffect, while this
may be an accurateestimationof one of the resultsof technicalcontrolon one level, it forgetsthat
most systems of control embody contradictionswithin themselves. For instance, while deskill-
ing, forms of technical control, and the rationalizationof work have createdisolated individuals
in, say, offices and factories, historically they have often generatedcontradictorypressuresas
well. The use of technical control has often broughtunionizationin its wake.25Even given the
ideology of professionalism(an ideology that might make it difficult for collective struggles to
evolve) which tends to dominatecertainsectors of the teachingforce, otherstate employees who
in the past have thoughtof themselves as professionalshave gained a greatercollective sense in
responseto similar modes of control. Thus, the loss of controland knowledge in one arenamay
generate countervailingtendencies in another.

ACCEPTINGTECHNICALCONTROL

Thus far in this essay, I have looked at teachersas if they are workers.I have arguedthatthe
processes that act on blue and white collar workers in the larger social agenda will and are
enteringinto the culturalformsthatareconsideredlegitimatein schools. Yet schools, becauseof
their internalhistory, are differentin some very importantways from factories and offices, and
teachers are still very different from other workers in terms of the conditions of their work.
"Products"are not as visible (except much lateron in the roughreproductionof a laborforce, in
the productionand reproductionof ideologies, and in the productionof the technical/administra-
tive knowledge "required" by an economy)26as in offices and factories. Teachers have what
Erik Olin Wright has called a "contradictoryclass location"-that is, they are structurally
positionedbetween capitaland labor, with interestssometimesallied to both, andaremembersof
the new petty bourgeoisie-and hence cannot be expected to react in the same ways as the
workersand employees of large corporations.27Furthermore,thereare childrenwho act back on
teachers in ways an automobile on an assembly line or a paper on a desk cannot.28Finally,
teaching does not take place on a line, but goes on in separaterooms more often than not.
All of these conditionsdo not meanthatschools are immuneor autonomousfrom the logic of
capital. The logic will be mediated(in partdue to the school's role as a state apparatus);it will
enter where it can in partial,distorted,or coded ways. Given the specific differencesof schools
from other workplaces, a prime moment in its entry can be found less at the level of overt or
simple controls (do this because I say so) or at the level of bureaucraticform (because individual

25 Ibid, p. 181.
26
Apple, Culture,Class and the State, op. cit. andApple, Ideologyand Curriculum,op. cit. One could also claim that
schools operate to produce "use value" not "exchange value." Erik Olin Wright, personal communication.
27 See ErikOlin
Wright,Class, Crisis and the State (London:New Left Books, 1978), pp. 31-110 for a moreextensive
discussion of the natureof contradictoryclass locations. The very fact that teachershave a contradictoryclass location
means that, in particularsituations and at particularhistorical moments, it may be possible to "win them over" to a
progressivepolitical and culturalposition. This success is not guaranteed,but merelypoints to the structuralpossibilities
that exist. This possibility has been too long ignored by overly deterministicmarxisttheorists who assume-without
serious investigation-that no action in schools can be successful.
28
Therefore, any outcomes of schooling must be analyzed as the products of cultural, political, and economic
resistancesas well as sets of "determinations." See PaulWillis, Learningto Labour(Westmead,England:Saxon House,
1977).
116 Apple

teacherscan still be relativelyfree fromthose kinds of encroachments).29.These controlswill go

on, of course;but they may be less consequentialthanthe encoding of technical control into the
verybasis of the curricularformitself. The level of curricular,pedagogic, andevaluativepractice
within the classroom can be controlled by the forms into which culture is commodified in
schools.
How are we to understandthe acceptanceand growthof this processof control?These forms
enter into schools not because of any conspiracy on the part of industrialiststo make our
educationalinstitutionsserve the needs of capital, but in large partbecause schools are a rather
lucrativemarket.These sets of materialare publishedby firms who aggressively marketwhere
there is a need, or where they can create needs. It is simply good business practicein terms of
profit margins to market material of this type, especially since the original purchase of the
"systems" or set of modules means increasingpurchasesover the years. The purchaseof the
modules(thoughcertainlynot cheap), with theirsets of standardizeddisposablematerial,means
thatone "needs" to continue to purchasethe work and test sheets, the chemicals, the correctly
colored and shapedpaper, the publishers'replacementsof outmodedmaterialand lessons, etc.
Profits are heightened with every replacementthat is bought. Since replacementpurchasesare
often bureaucraticallycentralized,because of budget control, in the office of the administrator,
the additionalmaterialis usually bought from the producer(often at exorbitantcosts) not from
one's local store.
Yet the notionof aggressivemarketingandgood business sense is but a partialexplanationof
this growth. In order to fully comprehend the acceptance of technical control procedures
embodied in curricularform, we need to know something of the history of why these kinds of
materialsevolved in the first place.
The original introductionof prepackagedmaterialwas stimulatedby a specific networkof
political, cultural, and economic forces, originally in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States.
The views of academicsthatteacherswere unsophisticatedin majorcurriculumareas "necessi-
tated" the creationof what was called teacher-proofmaterial.30The cold war climate (created
and stimulatedby the state in largepart)led to a focus on the efficient productionof scientistsand
techniciansas well as a relatively stable workforce;thus, the "guaranteeing"of this production
throughthe school curriculumbecame of increasingimport.31On top of this was the decision of
the educationalapparatusof the state, underthe NationalDefense EducationAct, to providethe
equivalentof cash creditsto local school districtsfor the purchaseof new curriculacreatedby the
"private sector" to increase this efficiency. At the same time, the internaldynamics within
educationplayed a partsince behavioraland learningpsychology-on whose positivisticprinci-

29 I do not want to
ignore the questionof the relationshipbetweencapitalismandbureaucracy.Weberand otherswere
not wrong when they noted that there are needs for rationalizationspecific to bureaucraticforms themselves. However,
neither the way bureaucracyhas grown in capitalist economies nor its effects have been neutral. This is treated in
considerably more detail in Daniel Clawson, "Class Struggle and the Rise of Bureaucracy," unpublisheddoctoral
dissertation,State Universityof New York, Stony Brook, 1978. See also Wright,op. cit. andMichaelW. Apple, "State,
Bureaucracyand CurriculumControl," CurriculumInquiry, in press.
30 The issue of gender is criticalhere. Since most
elementaryschool teacherswere (and are) women, the perceptionof
these teachersas unsophisticatedcannotbe separatedfromrelationsof patriarchaldominationin society. Comparehereto
what is happeningto women office workersin JaneBarkerand Hazel Downing, "WordProcessingandthe Transforma-
tion of PatriarchalRelations," unpublishedpaper,Centrefor ContemporaryCulturalStudies, Universityof Birmingham,
1979.
31 Joe
Spring, The Sorting Machine (New York: David McKay, 1976).
Curriculumand Labor 117

pies so much of these systems rely-gained increasingprestige in a field like education where
being seen as a science was critically importantboth for funding and to deflect criticism,32
therebyenhancingits legitimacy within the state apparatusand to the public. In the more recent
past, the increasinginfluence of industrialcapitalwithinthe executive and legislative branchesof
government,as well as in the attendantbureaucracy,33 is no doubtan essentialelement here since
there is recent evidence that the federal government has backed away from the widespread
productionand distributionof large scale curricula,preferringto stimulatethe "private sector"
to enter even more deeply into such production.34
This gives us a brief sense of history, but why the continuedmovementtowardthis today?A
key element here is seeing the school as an aspect of the state apparatus.For the state's need for
consent as well as controlmeans thatthe forms of controlin school will be encoded in particular
ways.35
The strategicimportof the logic of technical control in schools lies in its ability to integrate
into one discourse what are often seen as competing ideological movements, and, hence, to
generateconsent from each of them. The need for accountabilityand control by administrative
managers,the real needs of teachersfor somethingthat is "practical"to use with theirstudents,
the interest of the state in efficient productionand cost savings,36the concerns of parentsfor
"quality education" that "works" (a concern thatwill be coded differentlyby differentclasses
and class segments), industrialcapital's own requirementsfor efficient production-all can be
joined. It is here again that one can see how two importantfunctions of the state can be
accomplished. The state can assist in capital accumulation by attemptingto provide a more
efficient "productionprocess" in schools. At the same time, it can legitimateits own activityby
couching its discourse in language that is broad enough to be meaningful to each of what it
perceives to be importantconstituencies, yet specific enough to give some practicalanswers to
those who, like teachers, "require" it. The fact thatthe formtakenby these curricularsystems is
tightly controlled and more easily made "accountable," that it is usually individualized (an
importantideological element in the cultureof the new pettybourgeoisie),thatit focuses on skills
in a time of perceived crisis in the teaching of "basic skills," etc., nearly guarantees its
acceptabilityto a wide arrayof classes and interest groups.
Thus, the logic of controlis both mediatedandreinforcedby the needs of statebureaucratsfor
accountableand rationalproceduresand by the specific nexus of forces actingon the state itself.
The curriculumform will take on the aspects which are necessaryto accomplishboth accumula-

32 I have discussed this in more detail in Apple, Ideology and Curriculum,op. cit.
33 See O'Connor, op. cit., and Manuel Castells, The Economic Crisis and AmericanSociety (Princeton:Princeton
University Press, 1980).
34
Among the reasons for the fact that the state has slowly but surely backed away from such production and
distributionis the controversythathas surrounded"Man:A Courseof Study," one of the federallysponsoredcurriculum
projectsthat is a favorite targetof rightistgroups in the Unites States. See Michael W. Apple, "Politics and National
CurriculumPolicy," CurriculumInquiry7 (number4 1977), 351-361. It is also importantto realizethattherehas been a
continuingtrendin capitalistcountriesin which corporationswill let the governmentsocialize the costs of development,
but would prefer to package and distributecurriculafor themselves.
35Donald, op. cit., 44.
36This is not meantto imply that the state always directly serves the needs of capital. It in fact does have a significant
degree of relative autonomyand is the site of class, race, and genderconflict as well. See Donald, op. cit., Wright, op.
cit., and Dale, op. cit.
118 Apple

tion and legitimation.37As Clarke puts it: "Even where institutionsmeet a logic requiredby
capital, their form and directionare never the outcome of a simple unidirectionalimpositionby
capital. They involve a complex political work of concession and compromise, if only to secure
the legitimacy of the state in popularopinion."38This is exactly what has occurredin the use of
this kind of curricularform.

THE POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUAL

So far I have examined the encroachmentinto the work of teachersof the technical control
systemsembodiedin curricularform. Yet, teachersarenot the only actorsin the settingwherewe
find this material. There are the studentsas well.
A numberof writershave noted that each kind of social formation"requires" a particular
kindof individual.Williams andothershave helpedus tracethe growthof the abstractindividual
as it developed within the theoretic, cultural,and economic practicesof capitalism.39These are
not simply changes in definitions of the individual, but imply changes in our actual modes of
materialand culturalproducing,reproducing,andconsuming. To be an individualin our society
signifies a complex interconnectionbetween our day-to-day meanings and practices and an
"external" mode of production. While I do not mean to imply a simple base/superstructure
model here, it is clearthatin some very importantways thereis a dialecticalrelationshipbetween
economic and ideological form. As Gramsci and others would put it, ideological hegemony
sustains class domination;subjectivities cannot be seen as unrelatedto structure.The school
provides a critical point at which one can see these things working out. As RichardJohnson
notes, "It is not so much a question that schools . . . are ideology, more that they are the sites
where ideologies are producedin the form of subjectivities."40
But what kind of subjectivity, what kind of ideology, what kind of individual may be
producedhere? The characteristicsembodied in the modes of technical control built into the
curricularform itself are ideally suitedto reproducethe possessive individual,a vision of oneself
that lies at the ideological heart of corporateeconomies. As Will Wright has demonstrated,
importantaspects of our culturalapparatusrepresenta worldin whichthe society recognizeseach
memberas an individual,but thatrecognitionis dependentalmostentirelyupontechnicalskills.
At the same time, while heighteningthe value of technicalcompetence, these culturalproducts
direct the individualto reject the importanceof ethical and political values throughtheir form.
They portrayan individualism,situatedin the contextof a corporateeconomy, in which "respect
and companionshipare to be achieved only by becoming a skilled technician." The individual

37 We shouldremember,however, thataccumulationand legitimationmay be in conflict witheach otherat times. Fora

discussion of these possible contradictionsand for an argumentaboutthe importanceof understandingthe way the state
and bureaucraciesact back on "economic determinations,"see Wright, op. cit.
ThoughI have not specifically noted it in this discussion, the transformationof discoursein the state is similarto, and
partof the same dynamic of, the reductionof discourse in the culturalsphere to purposive/rationalforms analyzedby
Habermas.I have dealt with the transformationof ethical andpolitical languagesinto technicalquestionsat muchgreater
length in Apple, Ideology and Curriculum,op. cit.
38 Clarke,
op cit., p. 241.
39 RaymondWilliams, TheLong Revolution(London:ChattoandWindus, 1961) andC. B.
Macpherson,ThePolitical
Theory of Possessive Individualism(New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). See also, John Brenkman, "Mass
Media: From Collective Experience to the Cultureof Privitization," Social TextI (Winter 1979), 94-109.
40RichardJohnson, "Three Problematics:Elementsof a Theoryof WorkingClass Culture," in Clarke,Critcherand
Johnson, op. cit., p. 232.
Curriculumand Labor 119

accepts and does any technical job that is offered and has loyalty to only those with similar
technical competence, not primarily"to any competing social and community values."41
An examinationof these curricular"systems" illuminatesthe extent to which this kind of
ideological movement is occurringin increasinglydominantcurricularforms. Here, the rate at
which a studentproceeds is individualized;however, the actualproductas well as the process to
be accomplishedare specified by the materialitself.42Thus, it is not "just" the teacherwho faces
the encroachmentof technical control and deskilling. The students' responses are largely pre-
specified as well. Much of this growing arrayof materialattemptsas precisely as possible to
specify appropriatestudentlanguageand actionas well, often reducingit to the masteryof sets of
competencies or skills.
The notion of reducingcurriculumto a set of skills is not unimportantsince it is partof the
larger process by which the logic of capital helps build identities and transformscultural
meaningsand practicesinto commodities.43If knowledge in all its aspects(of the logical type of
that, how, or to-i.e., information,processes, and dispositionsor propensities)is brokendown
and commodified, like economic capital it can be accumulated.The markof a good pupil is the
possession and accumulationof vast quantitiesof skills in the service of technicalinterests.In the
largersociety, people consume as isolated individuals.Their worth is partlydeterminedby the
possession of materialgoods or, as Will Wrightnoted, of technical skills. The accumulationof
such goods or of the "culturalcapital" of technicalcompetence-here atomisticbits of knowl-
edge and skills measured on pre-tests and post-tests-is a technical procedure, one which
requiresonly the mastery of the prior necessary technical skills and enough time to follow the
rules, at one's own pace, to theirconclusion. It is the message of the new petty bourgeoisie writ
large on the ideological terrainof the school.
In fact, one might hypothesizejust this, that this kind of movementspeaks to the increasing
importancein the culturalapparatusof the ideologies of class segments with contradictoryclass
locations, in particularwhat I have called the new petty bourgeoisie-those groupswho make up
middle managementand technical occupations.44The particularkind of individualismwe are
witnessinghere is an interestingshift froman ideology of individualautonomy,wherea personis
his or her own boss and controls his or her destiny, to a careerist individualism. Here the
individualismis gearedtowardsorganizationalmobilityandadvancementby following technical
rules. As Eric Wrightputs it, for the new petty bourgeoisie "individualismis structuredaround
the requirementsof bureaucraticadvancement."45It may also be a coded "reflection" of the
increasingproletarianizationof white collar work. For, while previouslyindividualismsignified
some serioussense of autonomyover how one workedandwhatone produced,for a largeportion
of white collar employees autonomyhas been trivialized.46The rateat which one works may be
individualized,but the work itself, how it is accomplished, and what the exact specificationsof
the final productwill be, are increasinglybeing specified.
When technicalcontrolmeans thatthe formthatthe curriculumtakes is highly specified, that

41
Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1975), p. 187.
42
Bernstein's work on class and educational codes is interestinghere. As he notes, "The pacing of educational
knowledge is class based." It is based on "middle-class views of socialization." Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and
Control, Volume3 (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 113.
43
See Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 95.
44E. 0. Wright, op. cit., p. 79.
45 Ibid, p. 59.
46
Ibid, p. 81. See also Braverman,op. cit.
120 Apple

it is individualizedto such an extent thatthereis little requiredinteractionamongthe studentsso

that each activity is by necessity viewed as an individualintellectualact of skill, that answers
often takethe formof simple physical activities(as we saw in the moduleI discussedearlier),that
answersareeithercorrector incorrectbasedon the applicationof technicalrules, andthis kindof
form is what one follows throughoutone's elementaryschool life, what impactdoes it have on
the teachers and students who interactwith it at the level of practiceeach day?
We do have evidence to suggest whatproceduresof this type do to workersin industryand in
offices. In many cases, even given the developmentof complex work cultures that provide a
grounding for cultural forms of resistance for many men and women workers,47increasing
rationalizationand a more sophisticated level of control over a long period of time tend to
encourage people to manifest an interestingarrayof traits: a "rules orientation," that is, an
awarenessof rules and proceduresand a habitof following them;greaterdependability,that is,
performinga job at a relatively consistent level, being reliable, and getting the job done even
when rules have to be modified a bit to meet changingday to day conditions;and, the "internal-
izationof the enterprise'sgoals and values," thatis, conflict is minimizedand, slowly but surely,
there tends to be a homogenizationof overt interestsbetween managementand employees.48
Will this happen in schools as well? This clearly points to the significance of engaging in
analyses of what actually happenswithin the school itself. Do teachersand studentsaccept this?
Will the gradualintroductionof the logic of technical control generateresistances, if only on a
culturallevel?'Will class, gender, and work culturescontradict,mediate, or even transformthe
expected outcomes? It is to this that we shall now turn.

RESISTANCES

I have not presentedan optimisticappraisalhere. As the activitiesof studentsareincreasingly

specified, as the rules, processes, and standardoutcomes are integratedthroughandrationalized
by the materialsthemselves, so too are teachersdeskilled, reskilled, and anonymized. Students
work on material whose form both isolates individuals from each other and establishes the
conditionsof existence for the possessive individual;the form of the materialand the embedded
natureof the technical control process do nearly the same for the teacher. Surroundedby a
specific logic of control, the objective force of the social relationsembodied in the form itself
tends to be quite powerful. Yet I am not arguingfor a crude kind of functionalistperspective,
where everything is measuredby, or is aimed toward, its ability to reproducean existing static
society. The creationof the kind of ideological hegemony "caused" by the increasingintroduc-
tion of technical control is not "naturally" pre-ordained.It is somethingthat is won or lost in
particularconflicts and struggles.49
One the one hand, teachers will be controlled. As one teacher said about a set of popular
materialeven more integratedand rationalizedthan the ones I have pointed to here, "Look, I
have no choice. I personallydon't like this material,but everyone in the districthas to use this
series. I'll try to do other things as well, but basically our curriculumwill be based on this."
47
Apple, Culture, Class and the State, op cit., especially Chapter4.
48 Edwards,op. cit., pp. 150-151. This does not mean that importantresistancesand countervailingpracticesdo or
will not occur. But they usually occur on the terrainestablished by capital.
49 RichardJohnson, "Histories of Culture/Theoriesof
Ideology: Notes on an Impasse," in Michele Barrett,Philip
Corrigan,AnnetteKuhn, andJanetWolff, eds., Ideology and CulturalProduction(New York:St. Martin'sPress, 1979),
p. 70.
Curriculumand Labor 121

On the other hand, resistances will be there. This same teacher who disagreed with the
curriculumbut used it, also was partiallysubvertingit in interestingways. It was employed only
threedays a week insteadof the five days which were specified. As the teacherput it, "Listen, if
we worked hard we'd finish this stuff in two or three months and besides it's sometimes
confusing and boring. So I try to go beyond it as often as possible, as long as I do not teach what
is in the materialto be covered by this series nextyear."' Thus, as we can see fromthis last partof
her comment, internalconditions make such overt resistance more difficult.
Yet these internalconditionsneed not precludeteachersand studentsfrom also makingthese
commodified cultural forms their own, to generate their own creative responses to dominant
ideologies and commodifiedculture. Groupscan transformandreinterpretthe productsthey buy
and use so that they became tools for the creationof alternativepockets of resistancewhich are
integratedinto theirown lived cultures.50Studentsand teachersmay also find ways of creatively
using these systems in ways undreamedof by state bureaucratsor corporatepublishing,though
with contradictoryresults.
This last point aboutthe contradictionof lived cultureneeds to be stressed.One would expect
resistancesto the ideological practicesI have discussed in this essay on the partof the studentsas
well as teachers, resistances that may be specific to race, gender, and class. The earlierquote
from Johnsonis correcthere. The formationof ideologies-even those of the kind of individual-
ism I have examinedin this analysis-is not a simple act of imposition. It is producedby concrete
actors and embodied in lived experiences that may resist, alter, or mediate these social mes-
sages.51That this is often the case is documentedin a numberof recentethnographicinvestiga-
tions. These analyses clearly show that students not only reproducebut act against dominant
ideologies at one and the same time. Studentsfromparticularsegmentsof the workingclass, for
instance, often expressly reject the individualisticnorms and formal curriculaof the school.
Thus, as Paul Willis's studyof the childrenof parentsemployedin the aging industrialplants
in the "midlands" of England indicates, the curriculaconsidered legitimate by the institution
bear little resemblance to the actual world of work, to the life on the street, to the facts of
generalizedlaborthatmany of these studentsexperiencethroughtheirparents,friends, and their
own parttimejobs. They dismiss the school as basically irrelevant.By rejectingthe "legitimate"
culture within the school, by affirming manualwork and physicality, the studentsaffirm their
own subjectivityand at the same time act in a way which constitutesa realisticassessmentthat,as
a class, schooling will not enable them to go much furtherthan they already are.52
This partial "penetration" is paradoxical, however. By rejecting school knowledge, the
studentsare in essence rejectingmental labor. They thus hardenthe distinctionbetween mental
and manuallabor. While they are affirmingand acting on the strengthsof particularaspects of a
lived workingclass culture,they arecaughtin a realstructuralcontradictionby strengtheningone
of the majorprinciplesguiding the articulationof the social relationsof capitalistproduction.On
the one hand, they are learning to "work the system" by developing rathercreative ways of
dealing with the demandsof the school so that they can get out of class, meet as a group (and
thereby undercut the individualistic emphasis of the school), inject humor into the formal
curriculum,control the pace of school work, and so on. While this will preparethem to have
some power in the worldof work andrepresentsa 4 penetration"into the realityof the workthese

50Paul Willis, Profane Culture (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
51Johnson, "Three Problematics:Elements of a Theory of Working Class Culture," op. cit.
52 Willis, Learning to
Labour, op. cit.
122 Apple

studentswill probablyface, on the otherhand, it reproduceson an ideological level the categories

requiredto maintainwork as it is.
Other studies in the United States show similar things. For example, Robert Everhart's
ethnographyof junior high school studentswhose families were slightly "higheron the occupa-
tional scale" than those in Willis's analysis illuminateshow these predominantlyworkingclass
youth spend a large amountof their time "goofing off" and recreatingculturalforms that give
them some degree of power in the school setting.53While these studentsdo not totally reject the
formal curriculum, they give the school only the barest minimum work requiredand try to
minimize even those requirements.These students, like those in Willis's work, resisted. They
gave only what was necessary to not endangerthe possible mobility some of them might have.
Yet, they already "knew" at a culturallevel that this was only a possibility, one that was not
guaranteedat all. Most of them would, in fact, remainwithin the economic trajectoriesestab-
lished by their parents.
Similarinvestigationsof workingclass girls and black and brownyouth disclose exactly the
same things.54Taken together, they show a clear pattern. Ideological reproduction,when it
occurs, is not the result of a simple internalizationof dominantideologies. Oppositionaland
alternativemeaningsandpracticesgrow out of these situationsas well. In moretheoreticalterms,
the culturalsphere has some serious degree of relative autonomy.
In additionto these oppositionalelementsgeneratedout of the class, race, and gendercultures
of students, other aspects of the environmentmay provide the site for different meanings and
practicesto evolve, even within the existing curriculumform itself. There may be progressive
elementswithinthe contentof the curriculumthatcontradictthe messagesof the form.55The very
fact thatindustrialistsare interestedin contentspeaksto the importof contentas a contestedarea.
And it is in the interactionamongthe content, the form, andthe lived cultureof the studentsthat
subjectivitiesare formed. No element in this set of relationscan be ignored.

REMEMBERINGOBJECTIVECONDITIONS

The foregoing discussion of resistances should not blind us to the fact that the current
situation in many schools will not necessarily provide ideal conditions for such resistancesto
grow or to be politicized. Nor should we expect, as my treatmentof the culture of students
indicates, that these resistances and contradictionswill inexorably lead to progressive ends.
Instead, they will be filled with both potentialitiesand limitations.

53RobertEverhart,The In-BetweenYears:StudentLife in a JuniorHigh School (SantaBarbara:GraduateSchool of

Education,University of California, 1979).
54 Especially importanthere are Angela McRobbie, "Working Class Girls and the Culture of Femininity," in
Women's Studies Group, ed. Women Take Issue (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 96-108 and Mike Brake, The
Sociology of YouthCulture and YouthSubcultures(Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
55An ideological "reading" of any material is no simple matter, of course. To adequatelyexamine the possible
contradictionsbetween form and content in these or other materialswe would be requiredto unpackwhat is "present"
and missing within the content itself, what structuresprovide the parametersfor possible readingsof it, what "disson-
ances" and contradictionexist within it that provide for alternativereadings, and so on. In doing this, we need to
rememberthatany content "is itself partof an active processof significationthroughwhich meaningis produced."John
Hill, "Ideology, Economyandthe BritishCinema," in Barrett,et al., Ideology and CulturalProduction,op. cit., p. 114.
See also Colin Sumner:Reading Ideologies (New York: Academic Press, 1979) and Terry Eagleton, Criticism and
Ideology (London:New Left Books, 1976). I have discussed this in greaterdetail in Apple, Culture,Class and the State,
especially Chapter5.
Curriculumand Labor 123

Take teachersagain, for example. While technical controls foster unionization,most resis-
tances that occur within the school will be on an individualnot a collective level because of the
very social relationsgeneratedby the curricularform itself.56Here, too, the effects can be rather
contradictory.We must rememberas well that, as I mentionedearlier, these more "invisible"
modes of control may be accepted if they are perceived as coming from a legitimate overall
structure.The fact that curriculumselection committees give teachersa say in the curriculum
they will employ meansthatsome of the priorconditionsfor the consentnecessaryfor this kindof
control to be successful have already been laid. The choice is made, in part, by the teachers
themselves. Yet this is not necessarily only a negative point. Since the state apparatushas
expanded the range of participationin curriculumdecision-making by selection committees
(which sometimesnow includeparentsas well as teachers),the state may possibly be opening up
new spaces of opposition.57The growth of the discourse of rights of selection is objectively at
odds with the economic context in which the state finds itself. Given the fiscal crisis, the right to
select cannotbe acted upon because of the cost of new material.Hence, the state may ultimately
transformthe issue into a potentially politically volatile one.58
These potential conflicts, however, may be mitigated by ratherpowerful economic and
ideological conditionsthatmay seem all too real to manyof the individualsemployed withinthe
state. And the very same pressures may have importantand similar implications for those
teachers who may in fact recognize the impact that rationalizationand control are having on
them. Forthis is not a good time, ideologicallyor economically, for teacherswho engage in overt
resistance. Given a difficult ideological climate and given the employment situation among
teacherstoday-with thousandshaving eitherbeen laid off or living with the threatof it-the loss
of control can progress in a relatively unthreatenedway. Deskilling and reskilling, progressive
anonymizationand rationalization,the transformationof educationalwork, somehow seem less
consequentialthan such economic concerns as job security, salary, etc., even though they may
seem to us to clearly be part of the same dynamic.
When all this is said, though, we must recognize thatthese powerfulsocial messages, while
embeddedin the actual experiences of teachersand studentsas they go about their day-to-day
lives in classrooms, are highly mediatedby otherelements. The fact thatindividualteachers,like
most otherworkers,may develop patternsof resistanceto these patternsof technicalcontrolat the
informalculturallevel altersthese messages. The contradictoryideologies of individualismand
cooperativenessthat are naturallygeneratedout of the crowdedconditionsof many classrooms
(you can't be an isolated individualall the time when thereare 20 to 30 otherpeople aroundwith
whom one teachermust cope) also provide countervailingpossibilities. And lastly, just as blue
and white collar workers have constantly found ways to retain their humanityand continually
struggleto integrateconception and execution in theirwork (if only to relieve boredom), so too
will teachersand studentsfind ways, in the cracks so to speak, to do the same things. The real
question is not whether such resistances exist, but whetherthey are contradictorythemselves,
whetherthey lead anywherebeyond the reproductionof the ideological hegemony of the most
powerful classes in our society, whether they can be employed for political education and
intervention.
56
Edwards, op. cit., p. 154.
57
Green, op. cit.
58 The conflict between what mightbe called "personrights" and "propertyrights" which lies at the heartof this issue
is nicely laid out in HerbertGintis, "Communicationand Politics: Marxismand the 'Problem'of LiberalDemocracy,"
Socialist Review 10 (March-June1980), 189-232.
124 Apple

One task is first to find them. We need somehow to give life to the resistances,the struggles.
WhatI have done here is to point to the terrainwithinthe school (the transformationof work, the
deskilling and reskilling, the technical control, and so on) over which these struggles will be
fought. The resistancesmay be informal,not fully organizedor even conscious;yet this does not
mean that they will have no impact. For as Gramsci and Johnson59remind us, hegemony is
always contested. Progressivelyorientedscholarshipin educationshouldhelp in this contestation
and point to places for active engagement.

POLITICALACTION

My analysis of the process through which technical control enters the school through
dominantcurricularforms highlights a numberof these strategiesfor action. The expansionof
particularlogics of control of the labor process creates contradictoryeffects and provides a
potentialfor successful political work. I have claimed that, with the loss of control, one should
expect increasingunionizationof teachers.This providesan importantcontext. While the history
of unionizationhas in part been the history of economistic demands (and this is not always
wrong), at the same time it is not naturallypreordainedthatsalariesand so on arethe only things
that can be placed on the agenda. The growing "proletarianization"of state workersand the
rapiddecreasein theirobjective standardof living andjob stabilitymay, in fact, makeit easierfor
the formation of coalitions between teachers and other workers in similar conditions. If the
argumentsof Castells and others are correct-that ultimatelythe conditionswill worsen-then
cuts in public services, welfare, education, health, unemploymentbenefits, and so on will
become increasinglyextensive in the foreseeablefuture.60This will have a tendencyto place the
interestsof school employees in the maintenanceof theirprogramsandjobs on the same side as
the largenumberof people who will have to fight to retainthe programs,services, andrightsthey
have won after years of struggle.
This tendency is coupled with somethingelse. The rapidityof the pace in which procedures
are introducedto rationalize teachers' work and to control as many aspects of education as
possible is having an impact similar to what happened when Taylorism was introducedin
industry.Its ultimateeffect may not be totally successful control, thoughone shouldnot dismiss
its power and sophistication.Rather, in the long run, it may discreditteachers'organizationof
their own work so that the activities necessary for serious education to go on, activities that
teachershave developed out of their own experiences and work culture, will be labeled as the
educationalequivalentof "soldiering" when they are not expressly linked to the productionof
the knowledge and agents needed by an economy. Needless to say this would have a truly
destructiveeffect on any system of educationworth its name.
Enablingteachersto see the implicationsof this and having both them and otherblue, pink,
andwhite collar workersrecognizethe similaritiesof theircollective predicamentis an important
political step. If they do in fact occupy a contradictoryclass location, then a significant path
towardspolitical educationcan be traveled. This is somethingthat progressiveelements within
teacherunions and feminist teachercooperativesin the United States, Canada,Latin America,
England, and elsewhere in Europe have recognized and on which they are acting now.

59AntonioGramsci,Selections From the Prison Notebooks(New York:InternationalPublishers,1971) andJohnson,

"Histories of Culture, Theories of Ideology," op. cit.
60Castells, op. cit.
Curriculumand Labor 125

Of course, much more could be said, especially aboutthe necessity for progressiveaction to
change our dominantstrategiesof teaching and curriculum.61 Again, my claim is not that it will
be easy to establish such progressivecoalitions or to engage in eitherpolitical educationamong
state workers or curriculumreform. Given currenteconomic conditions and given the right's
skillful integrationof populardemocraticandcorporateclaims andtheirincorporationof populist
themes into the rhetoricof an increasingsphereof capitalistsocial relations,the implicationsare
exactly the opposite. It is possible, not easy. However, it is on the terrainthatI have identifiedin
this essay thata good deal of the strugglewill be workedout. The terrainoffers notjust increasing
incorporation,rationalization,and control but opportunitiesas well.

61
See, for example, Ira Schor, Critical Teaching and EverydayLife (Boston: South End Press, 1980).

Radical Science Journal

RSJ9 is now available (160 pages) ?1.50/$3.50
KARL FIGLIO-Sinister Medicine? A Critique
of Left Approaches to Medicine
GIANNA POMATA-Seveso. Safety in Numbers?
MIKE HALES-Open Letter to Academics
LES LEVIDOW-Three Mile Island
DANIEL SCHIFF-Hard Spheres
Plus reviews of Sohn-Rethel, Kraft, E.O.Wilson, letters and notes
section, and the first part (on medicine) of a Critical Bibliography
Bookshop distribution in Britain by PDC London, 27 Clerkenwell Close,
London EC1, and in America by Carrier Pigeon, 75 Kneeland Street,
Boston, MA 02111
RSJ's ISSN is 0 305 0963
Subscriptions from RSJ: ?4.50 individual, ?10.80 institutional, for 3 issues.
Bulk Orders: one third reduction on ten or more copies.
Please add equivalent of 60p on cheques not in ? sterling, and 20p for
single copies.
RADICAL SCIENCE JOURNAL
9 Poland Street London W1