ABSTRACT
Why is it that there is so much intellectual activity around issues of power and politics in the social sciences and the humanities, yet so little of it has influenced theory, research, and practice in the field of literacy education? This is indeed a curious situation, especially when we consider that by 1984-the publication year of the first Handbook of Reading Research (Pearson, Barr, Kamil, & Mosenthal, 1984)—critical perspectives on teaching, curriculum, and schooling had begun to take hold in schools of education. The publication of books like Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971) and Schooling in Capitalist Society (Bowles & Gintis, 1976) challenged the long-standing fiction that schooling is a neutral activity, and proposed, instead, that teaching and curriculum are political practices inasmuch as they produce knowledge for purposes of social regulation. As such, critical approaches represent a critique of widely held functionalist views about the role of schooling in society, which suggest that schooling is “an efficient and rational way of sorting and selecting talented people so that the most able and motivated attain the highest status positions” (Hurn, 1993, p. 45). For example, the image of schooling as an opportunity for social mobility based on merit is replaced, in critical thought, by one that shows how schools reproduce the unequal distribution of wealth and power that is the hallmark of capitalist societies, and in so doing contribute to the maintenance of the status quo (Shannon, 1996).
