Reviews for Essays on World Religion

The average rating for Essays on World Religion based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-26 00:00:00 Marcelo Fernandez It is all too easy for progressive people to feel overwhelmed by the various attacks from the right on democracy and public education. A central argument of this book is that while ‘the right’ appear to be a homogenous mass always working in concert to undermine public education and to install ‘market solutions’ and ‘parental choice’ – ‘the right’ is anything but a single force. In fact, there are many fractures to the right and the reason why these internal splits are often ignored by the left is that progressives too often accept how ‘the right’ has been framed by neoliberals, and so often push some sections of the less radical right further into the arms of neoliberal extremists. The lesson of this book is for progressives to find ways in which they can work with anyone so as to defend, extend and reinvigorate public education. Another of the mistakes progressives make when it comes to looking at the kinds of people who support right wing solutions is to assume (for anyone on the right earning less than say Mitt Romney and paying more tax than he does) that these people have been infected by ‘false consciousness’. That is, in one of my favourite quotes from Steinbeck, that rather than seeing themselves as working class, they think they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. But Apple spends a lot of time arguing against this view of false consciousness. People support the right for very real reasons, not just that they have been lied to or become they are confused, and some of these reasons have to do with how bureaucratic and how unresponsive state schools have become to their concerns. As such it would be a travesty to lump all people on the right into a single group of the ideologically insane. Unfortunately, those on the left don’t hold a monopoly on truth or on outrage. Recognising the real problems of a sometimes unresponsive state system would seem to be something the left should easily embrace. The right is divided in this book into four main groups. Neoliberals, who see the state as always bad and inefficient as long as it is doing anything other than protecting property rights through the legal system, army or police force. They want to improve society by lowering taxes and by imposing market solutions. Customer choice is fundamental and the key definition of ‘freedom’. Neo-conservatives are often confused with neoliberals, but wrongly so. They believe that the world has moved too far from traditional values and as such is undermining the social contract and the basis upon which we became a great civilisation. They look back with fondness to a simpler and more unified past. But where neoliberals are obsessed with reducing the state to a rump, neoconservatives would often prefer to see a larger role for the state. They are not as convinced that we should replace ‘citizens’ with ‘customers’. Neoconservatives do not hold the same views as the left on the kinds of issues that should be focused on. They are much more likely to fixate on movements against abortion or gay marriage rights. All the same, to confuse them with neoliberals negates any opportunities that might exist to work with them on more progressive policies and forces them increasingly into the arms of neoliberals. Another group is a kind of managerial class that has increasingly grown in our post-industrial society. These see social progress as being linked to improved measurement and efficiency. These people are not necessarily in love with neoliberal beliefs either, but are blinded by simple sounding solutions that involve constant standardised testing and restricted curricula to ensure our kids ‘have the basics’ when they leave school. The final group ‘on the right’ he discusses is the religious right – and here he devotes the most space, giving a fascinating history of the rise of the religious right and fundamentalist Christianity in the United States. He does anything but dismiss this group – saying that given they hold very strong religious views and also see these views as the defining parts of their personalities the left has often effectively forced these people into the arms of the right by refusing to compromise with them at all around religion in schools. These people believe that state schools are terrifying places that actively teach their children evil and so it is hardly surprising that they might seek to remove their children from such schools. Apple also says that there should be much that the religious right should find repulsive in the views and positions of the neoliberals, but that the debate has been framed in such a way that there appears little alternative to neoliberal ideas for these people to move towards. And this is the key idea in this book, I think. That the right have been remarkably successful in framing their ideas as if they were nothing other than ‘common sense’. I get a cold shiver down my spine when I hear people talk of ‘common sense’. Particularly when common sense is placed in a sentence with education. Many of the ‘solutions’ the right proposes as common sense have been constantly proven to not improve education standards. This is one of the more remarkable facts of education research – that the results of education research are constantly ignored by those on the right. That neoliberals can, without blushing, blame teachers and teacher unions for the failures of the education system while slashing funding to schools and imposing standardised tests that destroy student motivation to learn, and this has been shown over and over again to be directly counter productive – well, counter productive if what you were seeking to achieve was better educational standards for students – particularly students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. But still, ideology generally wins over facts. Apple ends this book by looking at cases where there have been united actions by groups on both the left and the right for common causes. One of these is around Channel One in the US. There are neoconservatives who are just as outraged by the entrapment of school students so as to market to them by corporations selling junk food and sugar drinks as anyone on the left. Some of these groups have joined with progressive forces to try to stop the expansion of this television channel that is piped directly into school classrooms and to find ways to weed it out of where it has taken root. It is true that these groups may have many other policies and desires that progressives would find repulsive, but politics is the art of the possible and as such shouldn’t be played by purists. It is not a compromise on principle to work with people who have a common aim – even if they have very different reasons for having that same aim. The right has many more resources and much more access to power than those of us on the left. This means they can frame the debate in ways that make aggressively anti-democratic ideas and actions seem to be common sense and inevitable. To counter these attacks progressive people need to call those on the right on the effects of their policies, particularly in destroying the one chance people at the bottom of society have of finding ways out of poverty and hopelessness. There is also a fascinating discussion on racism and the impact of racism on school outcomes. It must be remembered that eugenicist arguments have formed a core underlying and unifying theme around much of education policy in much of the West for over 100 years. McCallum’s excellent The Social Production of Merit gives a fascinating history of this in the Australian educational context. Apple's point is that whiteness is often ignored as a ‘race’. Being white is seen as being ‘without a race’ – and therefore as the default or standard. He makes the fascinating link to a ‘white sheet of paper’ as also being ‘blank’ and therefore unremarkable. But this is an idea that truly does need to be troubled. Much of the book details how groups on the right seek to present themselves as the new Negroes – grossly disadvantaged and discriminated against by a society that sees them and their views as needing to be suppressed. But such a view is only sustainable on the basis of a blindness to the real disadvantages faced by people of colour. Such inversions are typical of the ideological positions on the right – where the rich are the ones discriminated against, where taxes are a kind of theft and where free healthcare is anti-freedom. This book calls for a critical analysis of race as fundamental in understanding what needs to be done to address the needs of public education in America. The book ends by talking of hope as a resource – that to be able to face what often seem like overwhelming odds requires us to face the world with hope in our hearts. I think that his helping us to see that the right are not a single mass and that there is more we can do to convince elements of the right to support, rather than destroy, state education, provides some basis for that hope.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-19 00:00:00 Justin Cantu Just finished this book as part of the class. In it, Apple examines these rightist groups active in the debates within education: 1) Neoliberals, who are deeply committed to markets and to freedom as “individual choice” 2) Neoconservatives who have a vision of an idyllic and Edenic past and who want a return to discipline and traditional knowledge 3) Authoritarian populists, who are essentially religious fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals who want a return to God (ie, to thier God in particular) in all our American institutions 4) The managerial and professional new middle class, who are the mapmakers and experts In discussing in this 2006 book the reconstruction of common sense among education debates, he perfectly presages Trump's modus operandi: “Tactically, the reconstruction of common sense that has been accomplished has proven to be extremely effective. For example, clear discursive strategies are being employed here, ones that are characterized by ‘plain speaking’ [like trump and his plain-speaking appeal]and speaking in a language that ‘everyone can understand’ … These strategies also involve not only presenting one's own position as ‘common sense,’ but also usually tacitly implying that there is something of a conspiracy among one's opponents to deny the truth or to say only that which is ‘fashionable.’ As Gilborn notes, ‘This is a powerful technique. This is a powerful technique. First, it assumes that there are no genuine arguments against the chosen position; any opposing views are thereby positioned as false, insincere or self-serving. Second, the technique presents the speaker as someone brave or honest enough to speak the (previously) unspeakable. Hence, the moral high ground is assumed and opponents are further denigrated.’ Does that not does that not sound just like president Trump? In discussing religious conservatives’ position on teaching evolution versus creation, Apple does a good job of explaining just how very much is at stake for creationists by quoting the leader of the creationist group, Answers in Genesis: ‘Students in the public schools are being taught that evolution is a fact, that they’re just products of survival of the fittest. There’s not meaning in life if we’re just animals in a struggle for survival. It creates a sense of purposeless and hopelessness, which I think leads to pain, murder and suicide.’ Similarly, as discussed in the comment on Fraser’s “Between Church and State,” for many conservative evangelicals, America was founded as a Christian nation and what is at stake here for them is no less than the very meaning of America. Apple also highlights an interesting paradox related to religious conservatives who yearn for a restoration of a “Christian America.” He asks, What is it that religious conservatives want? A restoration of Christian America? Simply a recognition of their distinct cultural and religious heritage, values common beliefs that would enable them to participate more fully in societies public life? They want both. He and Fraser in “Between Church and State,” both cite Justin Watson's book “The Christian Coalition” – ‘They want their place at the table and they want everyone to agree with them. They want a Christian nation and religious freedom. As contradictory as it may seem, they want their cake and to eat it too.”