Introduction
Two or three years ago I was asked to write a personal statement for a volume that was reprinting a number of my papers. In that piece,
I tried to document the .kinds of political and personal commitments
that I felt provided an irreducible minimum. set of tenets which guided ·
my work as an educator.1 In summary, I argued strongly that education
was not a neutral enterprise, that by the very nature of the institution,
the educator was involved, whether he or she was conscious of it or not,
in a political act. I maintained that in the last analysis educators could
not fully separate their educational activity from the unequally responsive institutional arrangements and the forms of consciousness that
dominate advanced industrial economies like our own.
Since writing that statement, the issues have become even more compelling to me. At the same time, I have hopefully made some progress
in gaining a greater depth of understanding into this relationship between
educational and economic structure, into the linkages between knowledge and power. In essence, the problem has become more and more
a structural issue for me. I have increasingly sought to ground it in a
set of critical questions that are generated out of a tradition of neoMarxist argumentation, a tradition which seems to me to off er the most
cogent framework for organizing one's thinking and action about education.
In broad outline, the approach I find most fruitful seeks to "explicate the manifest and latent or coded reflections of modes of material production, ideological values, class relations, and structures of
social power - racial and sexual as well as politico/economic - on the state
of consciousness of people in a precise historical or socio-economic
situation. "2 That's quite a lot for one sentence, I know.
