Learning and Socialization

   I am currently reading Michael Apple's really interesting book, Ideology and Curriculum, where he talks about two very recent strains in educational thinking and philosophy. One way involves trying to think of education as a set of isolated techniques which are loosely based on a theory of inner development. Under this view, my lesson plans should be based on the stage of development of a person's mind, and it's presumed that all people around the world develop in roughly the same way and times. The second view is perhaps more interesting to me, and that is that education is related integrally to a process of socialization. Under this view, to learn is not simply to master a set of principles and reach a certain rung on a predetermined ladder of development. Rather, we learn through a complex process of 'cueing' into specific patterns in relation to groups of people and wider political/economic processes. This view presupposes that knowledge is not a universal, innate given, but may be something that is unevenly distributed depending on the class structure of the society. To use a very crude example: my learning to be a doctor is precluded by two considerations, namely that not everyone can qualify to learn the concepts necessary to be a competent doctor by society's standards, and the society itself can only afford so many doctors, considering the requirements of manual labour and other jobs.
    I find this view to be interesting because it makes me wonder: is it possible that in the end, we are only allowed to learn what has been permitted or sanctioned to us by the specific class and conditions we were brought into? Well, this view is a bit extreme, because it suggests that we are predetermined to think a certain way depending on previous conditions. A Buddhist perspective would offer a perhaps more middling view, and that is to say that mind is always immersed in conditioning, even though it has never been determined by the conditions themselves. I think that what Apple contributes to this discussion is that it expands our knowing what challenges we face in institutions of learning, and that what we learn and who it benefits are always questions worth raising. It has even made me wonder, to what extent are my 'failures to learn' really cognitive/developmental ones, and what part of those failures might be attributed to a social situation that might not encourage learning?


Apple, Michael W. (1980). Ideology and Curriculum. New York: Routledge.