ABSTRACT
Previous chapters in this book focused on counter-hegemonic actions and on a number of scholar/activists, activist educators, and educational movements historically and currently, nationally and internationally. The emphasis was on ways in which many people did and can speak back to dominant relations. Yet let us not be naïve. As I have shown in great detail elsewhere (Apple 2000; Apple 2006), we are not alone in acting in the space of changing the connections between education and other major institutions in society. This chapter returns us to a number of the concerns I raised in my introductory chapter—the neoliberal and neoconservative reconstructions of our institutions, of our common sense, of the meanings associated with democracy, and of our very identities. It portrays one example in depth. This is a lesser known instance, but it involves a very significant and successful movement to also use education to change society. But here the alterations are meant to transform our schools and the media so that they are more closely connected to the needs of some of the most powerful elements of corporate society. And it is definitely not a movement that Freire, Counts, Du Bois, Woodson, or the people who worked so hard to create an opening toward a “real utopia” in Porto Alegre would find satisfying, to say the least.
