Whose knowledge is taught in school, and whose is the knowledge not taught?
What are schools doing now? What can't they do?
What can schools do? What can teachers do?

Professor Michael Apple, a world-renowned scholar of 'practical education' and curriculum expert, is considered one of the 50 most influential authors in the field of education over the past 100 years.
His landmark work, "Ideology and Curriculum," which first appeared in 1979, explores cultural and economic power relations in education and has been selected as one of the top 20 internationally recognized educational masterpieces that have had a profound impact on 20th-century education.

In this book, Professor Apple examines the relationship between education and economic structure, and the link between knowledge and power, from a critical perspective grounded in neo-Marxism, and demonstrates in detail how school education contributes to economic and cultural reproduction in an unequal society.
Furthermore, we delve into school curricula to uncover the ideological content latent within them, in order to discover how the ruling class continuously organizes people's consciousness through schools to maintain social control without necessarily revealing the ruling mechanism.

According to John Rawls, for a society to be just, its principles and actions must prioritize the interests of the weakest.
That is, the structural relations of society must be equal not only in terms of access to cultural, social, and especially economic institutions, but also in terms of actual control over those institutions.
And to do this, we need to restructure existing institutions and fundamentally change the social contract that binds people.

---From "Prologue: Hegemony Analysis"

Bourdieu focuses on students' ability to deal with so-called 'middle-class culture'.
According to his argument, the cultural capital accumulated by schools serves as an effective filter, reproducing the hierarchical social structure.
For example, schools, through their seemingly neutral processes of choice and education, partially recreate social and economic hierarchies.
We take for granted the middle-class cultural capital, habitus, and teach it as if all children have equal access to it.

---From “Chapter 1: Ideology and Cultural and Economic Reproduction”

If we view schools as institutions that embody collective traditions and human will, then they are products of socio-economic ideologies.
Therefore, the following question would be an appropriate starting point for discussion:
“Whose meaning is collected and distributed through the explicit and implicit curriculum of the school?” To borrow Marx’s expression, reality does not wander around with labels.
The school curriculum represents and speaks for ideologies and cultural capital that come from somewhere.
However, it does not represent the vision of all groups, nor does it speak for the will of all groups.
So what are schools doing to distribute this cultural capital? Whose realities are "roaming" the hallways and classrooms of schools?
---From "Chapter 2: Economy and Control in School Life"

The fact that schools are being used for the purpose of maintaining hegemony is evident in the following two functions that schools perform.
One function is to teach cultural and economic values ​​and tendencies, which schools naturally believe should be 'shared by everyone'.
Another function is to 'guarantee' a high level of education by selecting only a limited number of students who are deemed to have the 'ability' to maximize the production of the technical knowledge that the economy demands.

---From "Chapter 3: History of Curriculum and Social Control"

The dominant school perspective teaches that all elements of society—from the postman and firefighter in first-grade textbooks to the imperfect institutions covered in high school civics courses—are functionally interconnected and that each element contributes to the maintenance of society.
And this view holds that internal discord and conflict within society inherently hinder the smooth functioning of social order.
This tendency is also evident in the educational experience, which implicitly emphasizes students as value transmitters and recipients rather than value creators.
---From "Chapter 4: Potential Curriculum and the Nature of Conflict"

The fundamental and unchanging goal of system management techniques is to impose rules on human behavior, and while they respect 'individual differences,' they actually ignore them.
Treating individual differences that clearly exist as if they do not exist is essentially nothing more than a forced manipulation.
This idea that human behavior needs to be manipulated was already inherent in the pursuit of certainty.
Through these manipulations, an abstract individual is born.

---From Chapter 5, System Management and Control Ideology

Labeling students in various ways is an act of a certain social group making a value judgment about the appropriate or inappropriate behavior of another group.
If this view is correct, much research is needed to support it.
Research should reveal that when the ideological and hegemonic structures of dominant social groups with widespread ethical, political, and social influence are imposed on schools, schools help to classify students along lines of class, race, and gender.
---From "Chapter 6: Common Sense Categories and the Politics of Stigma"

As Marx clearly stated in The German Ideology, “the ruling class gives its ideas universality and presents them as the only rational and universally valid ideas.” Therefore, this perspective can be used as a starting point for explaining the relationship between knowledge, ideology, and power.
In other words, no matter how complex the analysis, the fundamental principle guiding such inquiry is to reveal how the dominant ideas of society relate to the interests of specific classes and groups.

---From "Chapter 7 Beyond the Reproduction of Ideology"

We live in an age where a new historical reality is unfolding before our eyes.
The relationship of dominance and subordination is being re-established in surprising ways.
The horrific events of 9/11, the creation of a new version of the national security system, the weakening of long-standing civil rights struggles, the US invasion of Iraq without UN sanctions despite opposition from most countries, the continued suppression of those who oppose and criticize clear wrongdoings, the construction of an arrogant American empire, and so on.
Everything in this endless list is strongly related to one another.

---From "Epilogue: Ideology and Education after 9/11"