Official Knowledge

Michael Apple asks why the Right has been so successful in advancing its conservative agenda within education and shows how students and teachers are beginning to build more democratic education policies.

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Over the past decade the Right has largely taken over the educational agenda in many parts of the world. Such rallying points as privatization, choice and a return to "real knowledge" have become internationally familiar as has the primacy of the business agenda in judging school performance. Michael Apple's latest book, his first in six years, looks at how this has happened through the right's influence on policy, curriculum, textbooks and pedagogy. At the same time however, he points out areas of hope for the future, showing how students and teachers have continued the struggle and are now successfully engaged in building more democratic education policies and practices. Finally, Apple writes in more personal terms about his own struggle to counter the conservative restoration through his academic and school-based work.