Alberta Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 61.

4, Winter 2015, 503-506

Book Review

Official Knowledge: Democratic Education

Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational
Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States, is one of the most influential
and prolific critical educators in the world. As of August 2012, he was the author of more than
300 chapters in books, journal articles, and essays and of over 45 books. A number of the latter
have appeared in multiple languages and editions. The third edition of Official Knowledge:
Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, like its predecessors published in 1993 and 1999,
conveys Apple’s struggle “to understand the limits and possibilities of democratic educational
action” (p. ix).
This struggle involves “the immensely contradictory formations in education and elsewhere
of class, race, and gender relations in politics, in economics, and in culture” (p. 202). Apple
refers to his stance as “defiant humility” (p. xxii, emphasis in original). This

… involves defiance against the forces of dominance, capital, racism, and empire, even when, as now,
they are extremely powerful and challenging them involves very real risks. And it involves humility in
response to a new world and new dynamics—and to the processes of learning and unlearning that
such a new world calls for. (p. xxii)

Even during this period of rightist resurgence or conservative restoration when the
population is told that “what is private is now good and what is public is bad inside and outside
of education” (p. 9), compromises and contradictions within the dominant right groups “almost
always leave or create space for more democratic action” (p. 9).
In the newly updated preface, Apple presents a more complicated and nuanced view of what
he refers to as “authoritarian populism” in Chapter 2. He now sees four elements within the
dominant Right. These are neoliberals, the lead group who believe in modernizing the economy
and are supporters of vouchers and choice plans, neoconservatives, supporters of a return to
high standards, classics, and common knowledge and values, authoritarian populists,
supporters of traditional religious principles and values, and segments of the new middle class,
who are supporters of accountability and technical and managerial approaches to education.
One of the reasons that conservative analyses are on the ascendency today is that they make
good sense to many people. For example, the belief that immigrants are responsible for high
unemployment, that teachers’ unions protect teachers at the expense of learning among
students, or that parents should have a choice of school their children attend and what they are

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taught. The Left must not only expose the structural roots of these phenomena, it should also
learn from the Right how to use terms and provide analyses that make sense to large segments
of the population.
Although Apple refers to a “new world,” many of his concerns about the need for a more
democratic education system have been with him for a very long time. To understand the origins
of these concerns and his continuing anger at what the education system is doing to students,
readers should first read the Appendix, Education, Power and Personal Biography—An
Interview. Apple reasonably suggests that among the experiences that helped him understand
why he moved in a certain direction, such as to the Left, the most salient are that he was born
into a poor working class family with leftist parents, he attended two state teachers’ colleges at
night and worked as a union printer and truck driver during the day, he became a teacher in an
urban minority school district in Paterson, New Jersey, and served as president of a teachers’
union. He attended graduate school at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City,
New York, where he said that he was able “to link my own educational and political history with
an entire range of radical literature and to ground myself with it intellectually as well” (p. 200).
In addition to the new preface, the third edition of Official Knowledge contains updates to
the preface of the second edition and to eight of the 10 chapters. The most significant change
involves the addition of two new chapters. Chapter 9 differs from the others in that while they
focus on primary and secondary levels of education, this one focuses on higher education.
Apple’s views on the relative autonomy of culture enable him to suggest that religious
movements may have an increasingly greater impact on knowledge and teaching in the United
States and in many other countries. His theoretical views supporting the relative autonomy of
culture place him at odds with classical Marxists who view culture as part of the superstructure
and, therefore, a reflection of the economic substructure.
Apple goes on to describe the current global impact of neoliberalism on universities. These
include a shift from public to private support from individuals and corporations, an emphasis on
economically productive disciplines in the natural and applied sciences at the expense of the
humanities, a shift from full- to part-time faculty, and from grants to loans. In combination
these shifts result in a greater impact of economic factors on higher education. Students and
parents stress the importance of return on investment and pressure universities to offer career
oriented programs, and faculty increasingly pursue short-term research projects that conform to
the expectations of corporate sponsors rather than long-term research projects that may have
little or no foreseeable market value.
As one might expect, given his union and working class background, Apple argues that many
critics have focused on the faculty and have neglected the impact of working conditions,
outsourcing, and pay cuts on support staff like clerical workers, building maintenance and food
preparation staff, and security personnel. In addition, many progressives fail to recognize “the
hidden labor that enables academics to do their teaching” (p. 177) and that these workers are
often women, immigrants, and racial and ethnic minorities. These observations are consistent
with my experiences in administrative positions for 25 years at a community college and in full-
time teaching positions at two public four-year colleges for 10 years.
This discussion is preceded in Chapter 8 by Apple’s story of his Friday Seminar. This
seminar that has been meeting for over 40 years brings him together with his doctoral students,
activists, and visiting scholars from other institutions and other countries. They explore ways to
“alter the dominant politics of culture and the ways pedagogy and curriculum are now carried
on” (p. 166).

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 A Review of Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age, 3rd edition

In Chapter 6, written with Susan Jungck, Apple illustrates how teachers reacted to the
introduction of a computer literacy unit in every seventh grade math class in a school district.
Some of the teachers resisted this imposition. Although this resistance was quite modest, for
Apple it is a positive sign that official directives must gain acceptance before they are
implemented.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are a trio of extremely well developed and informative essays where
Apple examines the commercial and cultural conflicts over the construction of official
knowledge in education. For instance, in Chapter 3 he documents the history of debates and
conflicts over what texts should be adopted and what narratives they should contain. The role of
the state government in adopting and regulating such texts, especially in the southern part of the
United States, is documented in Chapter 4. Traditions of racism and a hierarchical view of
society help to account for the relatively greater strength of the state in determining what is
official knowledge in the South. In Chapter 5 Apple describes the adoption of a commercially
produced television news program, Channel One, by thousands of schools throughout the
United States. Rather than the state, here business is working with school systems in an attempt
to define official knowledge through this program. The existence of such a relationship
reinforces the ideology that public education is not a public responsibility and opens the door for
private influence.
Rather than use technology such as computers and television to prepare students for the
work world, Apple attempted to use film-making as a means of encouraging students to tell their
own stories and to view themselves as creative and active agents. He tells this story in Chapter 7.
He and a number of his students offered a film-making course at a state–run corrections
institution for girls. As students began to show enthusiasm, pride, and trust, the program was
killed. It was deemed “interesting” but “it was in essence a frill” (p. 155). Apple was informed by
the administrative and educational staff of the institution that the students had to get back to
studying official knowledge such as remedial reading and life skills courses. In sum, “[t]alents
were uncovered. Joys and possibilities were made visible, only to be once again denied” (p. 155).
Apple leaves it up to the reader to determine the extent to which this program was a success. In
terms of its limited scope, he makes the valuable point that effective education change must
start with the local context; “After all, this is where we act” (p. 150).
In the second of the new chapters, Chapter 10, the book’s final chapter, Apple welcomes “the
very public radical change in ideological and educational positions by someone who was one of
the most visible figures promoting the rightist agenda in education for decades” (p. 184). This is
Diane Ravitch, the public historian of education. Although he believes that Ravitch is late in her
conversion, he welcomes her more progressive views about unions, privatization, standardized
testing, multiplication of charter schools, and excessive accountability.
Overall, Apple has done an outstanding job of demonstrating that official knowledge in
education is socially constructed. At the same time, he has done an equally outstanding job of
demonstrating how with a mixture of anger, compassion, theory, and practice, a lot of help from
friends and allies, and examples from opponents, activists can help challenge that official
knowledge. The message of Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age is
quite clear. We must be willing and able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of current
educational policies and practices and we must be equally willing and able to resist and replace
those policies and practices. To his immense credit, Apple has delivered this message in
straightforward, understandable, and, with rare exception, jargon-free language.

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M. Oromaner

Mark Oromaner is an independent scholar. He retired after having taught sociology at Hunter College,
City University of New York in New York City, and at Jersey City State College in Jersey City, New Jersey,
for a combined period of 10 years. He then served in a number of administrative positions, such as dean,
executive vice president, and acting president at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City. His
writing and research interests are in the sociology of knowledge and information, structure of higher
education, and history and development of the social sciences.

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