Beyond Base Superstructure and the Role of Ideology: Some Notes from the Sociology of School Knowled

1

• Beyond Base - Superstructure and the Role of
  Ideology Some Notes from the Sociology of School
  Knowledge

2
JEAN ANYONS POLITICAL-ECONOMY APPROACH
Educators who care deeply about these students
must come to grips with the fact that no amount
of school reform as presently conceived will make
the economy accept minority high school graduates
in a more humane manner. Even the latest
equity-seeking reform--small, democratic, and
personally nurturing high schools where advanced
courses are offered to make students
college-ready--lack meaning and consequence when
students and their families cannot obtain support
for the college years, (Jean Anyon, p. 45).
We cannot expect education to compensate for
inequalities wrought by macroeconomic policy,
(Jean Anyon, p. 38).
3
What are the root causes of poverty?
NOT education!
Lok to Federal policies
Tax regulations (variation based on income) Low
government spending on infrastructure and human
capital development Wage guidelines
4
Base-Superstructure Metaphor Reasoning from a
Political-Economy Approach
In the social production of their life, men
enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will,
relations of production which correspond to a
definite stage of development of their material
productive forces. The sum total of these
relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society, the real foundation, on
which rises a legal and political superstructure
and to which corresponds definite forms of social
consciousness, (Marx, 1978, p. 4).
5
Ideological State Apparatuses Legal
institutions Political institutions Religious
institutions Schooling institutions Forms of
consciousness
Fig. 1 Foregrounding, Foreshadowing in Marxs
Capital
Fig. 2 Base-superstructure Model
6
Does Education Matter? Adding Complexity to Jean
Anyons Analysis
Yes! It plays a fundamental role in the
reproduction of the social relations of economic
production.
Education plays an ideological role.
-sets the ideological conditions for the
conditions that exist, at all levels, federal
policies, economic regulations, etc.
7
New Spatial Metaphors in the Sociology of School
Knowledge
Almost all ruling regimes have sought to ensure
that the school knowledge transmitted by the
educational system advances their interests in
state formation. However, it is simplistic to
assume that schools in general and the curriculum
in particular serve the dominant group in
mechanical and unmediated manner, (Apple, 2002,
p. 612).
8
Two theoretical moves
1. Re-thinking the role of the State in relation
to economic systems relative-autonomy
Political
Religious
Educational
Legal
9
2. The centrality of knowledge (ideology)
Working definitions
Strain Theory - ideology is defined as systems
of interacting symbols or meaning-making
sign-systems
Interest Theory - ideology is defined as beliefs,
ideas, meanings, that serve to justify the
interests of contending political, economic, or
other groups.
Hegemony Theory of Ideology - Michael Apple

• Ideology serves legitimation functions
• Ideology is negotiated, emerges from conflict
• Ideology convinces, mobilizes

10
The most powerful way of thinking through the
complex characteristics, the scope and varied
functions, of ideology is found in the concept of
hegemony, (Apple, p. 22)
WHAT IS HEGEMONY?
Michael Apples definition
An organic assemblage of meanings and practices,
the central, effective and dominant system of
meanings, values and actions which are lived,
(Apple, p. 5).
NOT
Mere opinion Manipulation Or just in our heads
-ideologies are lived, practiced
11
The Concept of Hegemony Origins in the Work of
Antonio Gramsci
Makes ideology central in understanding class
struggle
12
"It was Gramsci who, in the late twenties and
thirties, with the rise of fascism and the
failure of the Western European working-class
movements, began to consider why the working
class was not necessarily revolutionary, why it
could, in fact, yield to fascism." (Gitlin, 1994
516)
Class struggle must always involve ideas and
ideologies, ideas that would make the revolution
and also that would prevent it.
He stressed the role performed by human agency in
historical change economic crises by themselves
would not subvert capitalism.
Gramsci was more "dialectic" than
"deterministic" he tried to build a theory which
recognized the autonomy, independence and
importance of culture and ideology.
13
"It can be argued that Gramsci's theory suggests
that subordinated groups accept the ideas, values
and leadership of the dominant group not because
they are physically or mentally induced to do so,
nor because they are ideologically indoctrinated,
but because they have reason of their own."
(Strinati, 1995 166)
manufactured consent willful consent
co-opting of different ideologies and interests
by dominant groups
this is achieved through the complex
ideological apparatuses, and their production of
knowledge/ideologies
The knowledge that now gets into schools is
already a choice from a much larger universe of
possible social knowledge and principles. It is
a form of cultural capital that comes from
somewhere, that often reflects the perspectives
and beliefs of powerful segments of our social
collectivity, (Apple, p. 8)
14
How do we begin to build counter-hegemonic
strategies? Can we? Should we?