ABSTRACT
Introduction Within the last decade, conservatives such as Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Pat Buchanan, and Senator Jesse Helms have been able to beat progressives at their own game. They have placed the issue of culture and difference at the center of the debate about education and democracy. They have asserted the primacy of the political in invoking the language of culture and in doing so have let it be known that culture is a terrain of political and ideological struggle. The general ideological parameters of this struggle are partly revealed in the words of syndicated columinist Pat Buchanan, who has urged his fellow conservatives ‘to wage a cultural revolution in the 90s as sweeping as the political revolution in the 80s’ (Buchanan, 1989). Its more specific expressions have been made manifest on a number of cultural fronts including the schools, the art world and the more blatant attacks aimed at rolling back the benefits of civil rights and social-welfare reforms constructed over the last three decades. More specifically, the right-wing educational and cultural agenda, with its emphasis on heritage rather than liberating memory, literacy rather than literacies, censorship rather than artistic expression, moral regulation rather than self-and social empowerment, and testing rather than learning is mobilized by a vision of the arts, culture and schooling that presupposes and legitimates particular forms of history, community and authority. Within such a plethora of exhortations that are allegedly self-evident and self-justifying, there is a structured silence around the issue of how power, history and culture are organized to secure the authority and interests of specific groups. It is plain that it is not the voice of culturally diverse groups that the center of power defines as marginal because of race, class, ethnic or gender considerations. Nor is it the voice of those groups struggling to reclaim galleries, schools and other cultural spaces as agencies of social justice, critical expression and radical democracy. What is being valorized in the dominant language of the culture industry is an élitist view of self-and social development based on a celebration of cultural homogeneity, an undemocratic approach to social authority and a politically regressive move to reconstruct American life
within the script of Eurocentrism, racism and patriarchy. Similarly, within these discourses, the call to define civilization as synonymous with selected aspects of Western tradition is being matched by a fervent attempt to reduce pedagogy to the old transmission model of teaching and learning (Aronowitz and Giroux, 1991).
