ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on an interview with me conducted by Michael Peters in 2014. It is a more personal one than the interview that forms the core of Chapter 10. Instead, it is aimed at giving the reader a clearer sense of both many of the aspects of my background that have influenced me and of my own continuing efforts to build an ethically and politically critical stance in a society riven with exploitative relations. Michael Peters’ aim in the interview is described by him in the following way:
This interview is a source of interactive biography enabling not only the establishment of chronology and the discussion of intellectual influences, but also an understanding of the biographical aspects of intellectual projects and the inextricable links between life history and forms of activism. In this interview, conducted through the medium of email, I explore with Michael Apple how his past and upbringing helped shape his intellectual life and commitments.
While I have been interviewed many times before, this particular one combines two different kinds of reflections together. First, it is indeed considerably more personal, opening up a part of my biography for reflection both for the reader and for myself. And in the process, it connects with the dynamics that stand behind the story I tell in the new Preface to this 4th edition of Ideology and Curriculum. The questions that Michael raises also have stimulated me to think seriously about the role of a long tradition of family political and “religious” traditions in these efforts. (The reasons behind setting off the word “religious” in quotation marks will become apparent in the interview.)