ABSTRACT
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN school culture and power has suffered traditionally from the unwillingness of conservative and critical educators to give serious consideration to how schools as political sites both repress and produce subjectivities. The key term here is “both,” a term that suggests that schools not only constitute subjectivities through language, knowledge, and social practices, but also function in a related fashion to discredit, disorganize and dismantle specific ways of experiencing and making sense of the world. Conservative educators, for example, have focused on the production and maintenance of what is legitimated as a universal set of symbolic values and knowledge forms.1
This defense of, call it high culture, classical culture or simply a common culture has also found support among many progressive educators who have criticized schools less for reproducing it in the curriculum than for failing to democratize dominant school culture to make it accessible to all students.
