Audit Cultures, Commodification, and Class and Race Strategies in Education

Abstract

The author discusses some of the ways in which certain elements of conservative modernization have had an impact on education at multiple levels. He points to the growth of commodifying logics and the audit culture that accompanies them. In the process, he highlights a number of dangers currently being faced. However, he urges us not to assume that these conditions can be reduced to the automatic workings out of simple formulae. He argues that we need a much more nuanced and complex picture of class relations and class projects to understand what is happening – and a more sensitive and historically grounded analysis of the place of racial dynamics in the vision both of ‘a world out of control’ that needs to be policed and of ‘cultural pollution’ that threatens ‘real knowledge’ in the growth of markets and audit cultures. Thus, Michael Apple also urges his readers to listen carefully to the critiques coming from collective voices within oppressed communities and to not assume that one can read off their positions by reducing their agency to simply expressions of rightist ideological formula. Becoming more nuanced about such constitutive dynamics will not guarantee that we can interrupt the tendencies upon which he focuses here. But it is one essential step in understanding the genesis of what is at stake in a serious politics of interruption.