Live with Michael Apple

Live with Michael Apple
26 September 2011

[ these are my rough notes of his talk]

The state is not weak. He takes a pen and says this is the resource, if its this long…but neoliberals want half the pen taken away and put into private schools. This is not choice at an individual personal level for all.
Not everyone has choice equally. In my working life I can choose when I start stop. The other “Michael apple who also loves his son, but cannot drive across town get the child to the preferred school, pay in time and resource to get there…


Markets privilege the economically advantaged
They also privilege the male body, safety is not as even for girls, women, gay people

When you think of choice, as democracy it is a fiction.

A slippery sycophant of a word denying difference, denying gender, race, age,

Who has choice

His favourite quote surprises even himself, it is not Marx but Adam smith
Takes 500 poor people for every rich person
When god gave out genes white men at the front…
Front and back of line,

Who?
Cannot dismantle the masters house using the masters tools
Eg statistics

Decisions on whats good or bad, they have to teach the same thing or the measure don’t work, if they tech difft things get a regression to the median whether it works or not…if it raises test scores its good, neo conservatists love this

But in Canada, what is agreed on, what we agree on is we are differently positioned, what is common is the question
Rather than evacuating the curriculum lets deal do it

Cultural literacy…if a us/American kids..
What is common is disagreements, what is common ins the process of deliberation
We must have kids ask whose glasses am I putting on, whose knowledge s this
False consensus
What is common is that this nation is in motion


1st nation people, some stopped sasquatacwan, china,
policy smallpox vaccination, genocide
stolen people from africa dying before they got to montreal, Jamaica, new york they died
alice walker poetry (I think)
I will kill myself there is no I

Whose common is that, an African survivor
Politics that does not deal with the politics of voice
A changing population
With teachers who say this is not working daily
That destroys bodily understanding
Is not a curriculum at all it is an imposition
That lies of teachers, real children

Authoritarian populists, fundamentalists, increasing in Alberta is home schooled
And their curriculum bought on the web and says things like islam is the religion of the devil
And they believe teachers are worshippers of the devil
A final gp
Mohammed, sacred is his name, jesus, moses, people spiritual but do not believe in a man in the sky and to be honest I must work with the impoverished
The only way to restore order through the imposition of the religious

Go to stereotypes
A gp of people who enslave others

I think we have to speak out, it is something we should not ignore

New managerialists
If it moves in classes measure it and if it doesn’t measure it for it might

Performance pay is now the law in USA
Country of china has now also performance paid

If we can find good smart loyal teachers who improve good smart kids we will give them more money

Every nation who has implemented performance pay for teachers, has used it to fire teachers, not to pay them more

particularly, it devalues the wages of teachers who are working with disadvantage
Please vote against this

Its over why do u have to vote
I don’t have to say anything else
The smartest teachers in the worlds
In media
Don’t take the risk
Really nice people but you don’t have a clue of what is a good school but we will tell you

Two things for a strategy of interruption
1. the north must learn from the sth, Brazil a History of economic crisis
with influence of frère and Apple, teachers given more money because they had to work harder in a situation of 90% of children drop out in primary
that statistic now reversed.
Places with fewer resources than the north, with respect have to become our teachers as well
Places where kids can use the metaphor of putting on glasses to see whose knowledge it is that they are consuming, and to question this.

This becomes seriously crucial everytime I go to brazil I get stupider- I don’t know things- I watch to learn as coteachers and please be my teacher

2. simpler act- we in this room must become secretaries in everyschool teachers do unbeliebvable things yet press do not talk of this, teaching causes questing society u r teaching race gender…and we do not have the patience or money for this, you are creating unemployment, when the media say its all crummy lets attack it, it takes huge work to find what is being done well,
of all the books I have been involved in
best description of teaching I have ever heard; Gregory: I didn’t have time to pee, the best description of teaching I have ever heard in my life
a book called democratic schools, and asked by teachers to say…
and I understand this without quotes from Foucault, im feeling worn down, you must be my secretary I don’t have time to write it, but you must tape me, rewrite, make my successes known because I don’t have time to
democratic skills on 5 schools translated…

in the face of the blames and having to go out every day to change peoples lives there are things going on of which we must be immensely proud and our task is to keep alive the practice of the victory

There was a time in teachers lives in Boston in which there was a victory, you will be evaluated…a 19yr old young women on 6 months teacher ed said no. Let us say yes to keep Emma’s memory alive in our own bodies.


Liberals and the left have given me nothing but rhetoric but neoliberals will give me money, so there is no homogeneity, there are parts of poorer communities who accept therefore a neo liberal agenda. Caution needed in homogenizing groups.

Identity politcs no common ground,
Neoliberal would not be powerful without aspects of good sense…what is it about people’s lives that cause people to say this is broken, for some oppressed groups it is rediscovering who I am in a society deeply racist

If black or first nation person combination of class and race
And so identity

My solution to find a common agenda
A right to say, whether neo lib or otherwise there is a powerful sense of what is going wrongin whats behind the argument

Victories for some gps not others,
Im about controversies..