7
based on great ideas, but matters to be appreciated within contexts of real children, in real
classrooms with real teachers” (Reid 1992: 43). Reid ignores the fact that contemporary critical
theory of curriculum has long moved away from deterministic, single-cause grand narratives and
for decades has strongly emphasized the need to observe the rich complexity of curriculum-as-
practice. Rather than “relate everything to a single central vision” (Reid 1992: 43) critical
theorists actually employ a variety of theoretical traditions in their analyses of social phenomena,
including phenomenology, neo-Marxism, structuralist Marxism, and Foucauldian post-
structuralism. Although each of these frameworks was dominant at a particular time in history,
all of them contributed to contemporary critical theory, which eventually became their synthesis.
Apple’s foundational work Ideology and Curriculum, which to this day provides the best
articulation of the critical paradigm, unites these four traditions under the common framework of
Gramsci’s hegemony. Not unlike Joseph in her definition of dominant culture, Apple argues that
“hegemony acts to ‘saturate’ our very consciousness, so that the educational, economic, and
social world we see […], and the commonsense interpretations we pout on it, becomes the world
tout court, the only world” (Apple 1979: 5). In accord with Mead’s anthropological
methodology, Apple advocates the need to step back from taken-for-granted reality and to
examine “the knowledge that we teach, the social relations that dominate classrooms, [and] the
school as a mechanism of cultural and economic preservation and distribution and finally
ourselves as people who work in these institutions” within their broader historical and social
contexts (1979: 3).
Thus, like phenomenologists, Apple sees curricular knowledge as socially constructed,
rather than objective. However, like neo-Marxists and structuralist Marxists, he argues that its
construction is as a result of complex interactions between social structures, rather than as
Convention