On the Tasks of the Critical Educational Scholar/Activist

Abstract

Over the past three decades I have been dealing with a number of “simple” questions. I have been deeply concerned about the relationship between culture and power; about the relationship among the economic, political, and cultural spheres (see Apple and Weis, 1983); about the multiple and contradictory dynamics of power and social movements that make education such a site of conflict and struggle; and about what all this means for educational work. In essence, I have been trying to answer a question that was put so clearly in the United States by radical educator George Counts (1932) when he asked, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?”