Will Brehm  0:00
Michael Apple, welcome to FreshEd.

Michael Apple  0:06
It’s a pleasure to be with you, Will.

Will Brehm  2:33 
So, let’s start by maybe remembering what happened to education during the first Trump presidency, which feels like a lifetime ago, but was only what eight years or so? How would you sum up the politics of education in his first term? And I know that’s a pretty big question, but you know, just to sort of place us in a conversation, to begin thinking about what a second Trump presidency means, what do we need to remember about the first?

Michael Apple  3:38
Well, the first is we want to remember that this is revolutionary. It’s an attack on many, many things. But he came in the last time he was elected in a way that was fundamentally what we might want to call Gramscian. He understood profoundly that struggles over culture, over bodies, over things like curriculum, in a way, and our common sense about what counts as a good education were profoundly important to change people’s ideas about who they were, and also important in grabbing people so they came under his umbrella. And in order to understand that, we have to understand that no matter what the left or the Democrats were doing, they were not as good as he was about understanding the struggle of what we might call common sense notions of democracy. So, as one example, democracy is a sliding signifier. It has no essential meaning whatsoever. So, it’s like a water glass, and it’s filled with our understandings that it’s social, it’s not simply individual choice. But he was behind a major push to make education and democracy what we might call consumer practice. So, the first most important things to remember that he was struggling over the way we understand the world and the way we understand the social functions of education. And these ideological effects were on choice as really democratic. So, the public good meant, did Michael or Will get a choice for their kids, not whether it’s good for society. And its effects on curriculum were profound. We can see it, and I’ll talk more about this later. We’ll see it over the curriculum, over what knowledge is considered very important. It had profound effects on budget cutting much, more emphasis on religion than we’ve ever had in almost the recent century, there were attacks on teacher unions and on public sector employees, and there was, in many ways, I think, an expansion of recognition that race really counted. So, it was white-oriented -that, Will, also changed partly-, still masculine in profound ways, but it was a package in which he was less successful than I think he thought it would be, because he did not control the Senate, and he was trying out certain kinds of things. And many people may think he’s not very smart, but I think he is one of the smartest politicians we have had understanding the way ideological form works. So, again, that kind of mobilization of so many things, and it’s a bit like throwing stuff against the wall, and about half of it sticks. And once it sticks, it transforms all kinds of things, and it transformed future unions as well.
Will Brehm
Do you think under the Biden administration, any of the sort of quote, unquote things that stuck during Trump were unwound, or were, you know, peeled off the walls to keep the metaphor going?

Michael Apple
Well, Biden did some successful things. He was able to interrupt the budget cuts, so he was able to provide more funding for education. Things such as policies for COVID where families whose kids were suffering because, for instance, they couldn’t afford computers, and that meant that three or four of their children were falling years and years behind -there was more funding for that. There’s more voices for minoritized communities in various sort of policies. So, those kinds of things, we can say they didn’t totally stick to the wall, but the impression was there, and that became quite important. We also saw, though, at the same time, a growth of rightist or local and state policies. So, while Trump may not have been able to use the federal government quite as much, the oddity about the United States in terms of funding and ideological forms about education is the federal government has much less power than the state. So, the budgets are under 20% coming from Washington, from the feds, and what that means is that even though Biden was able to stop some of the ideological agendas, Trump and his cohorts were making massive change at the level of state community. So, it’s then hard to figure out, is it because Trump’s stuff stuck to the wall, or was he successful in ways that we still don’t quite understand? That is very successful at a local and state level. And I think that’s exactly what happened.

Will Brehm  8:11
Yeah, you know, you can think of different examples around the country where there’s been book bans and there’s been issues around transgender bathrooms. And, you know, there’s just been this whole discourse that is cropping up school by school, even, I would imagine, during the Biden administration.

Michael Apple  8:30
Exactly. We have a growth of groups -for instance, called Moms for Liberty, which is one of the major social mobilizations that actually incorporated a multiracial alliance that ban books powerfully. An example would be the state of Florida, and this is actually quite important for what we might want to talk about -the talents that Trump has. Moms for Liberty tends to be a right-wing group, but it is multiracial. So, there’s new volumes now looking at why Latino and Latina populations begin increasingly to move to the right, and oddly enough, much of the book banning and much of the formation of such ideologically populist groups like Moms for Liberty have their foundations within as much Latina communities who are worried about traditional religious forms and religious forms are very, very important, and Trump’s use and validation of quite conservative religious impulses catches on, not just to white evangelicals, though that’s crucial. He also is very, very clever and has a good deal of help being taught about this, about the ways in which minoritized communities are worried about a politics of sexuality. They’re often quite conservative about these kinds of things, and they’re often very deeply conservative about religious impulses, and they’re very worried that all these things of their children are under so much threat already, and what he would call the woke agenda, he uses that to pry loose sentiment by many minoritized communities that are saying “We’ve got more to worry about. How come we are no longer talking about racial discrimination? Why are we not talking about a labor process in which we have no gains whatsoever over the last decade? And instead, you’re talking about trans folks. You’re talking about books about Michael has two moms”. So, that he is, again, very clever in mobilizing some of these things that actually give supposedly more power to progressive groups, but he uses it to pry loose minoritized groups and pry loose, as we see in the last election, of many Black young men over those kinds of things. So, I hate to say this, but I perversely, truly perversely, think that he is very, very clever.

Will Brehm  11:01
I mean, I think I agree with you. I mean, he’s really clever. You know, you said the talents of Trump and, yeah, I mean, were you surprised by this diverse coalition that basically elected Trump? You know, there’s the Latina there’s people of color, the young Black men that are voting for Trump, but also in terms of class, right? There’s the people that earn income under a certain amount which have historically voted for the Democratic Party, have now in the majority, voted for Republicans. So, you know, is this surprising to you that Trump was able to assemble such a diverse coalition of voters?

Michael Apple  11:37
It’s surprising at an analytic level. It is not surprising about emotional economies. That phrase is very, very important. It is part of understanding that there’s, again, a Gramscian set of concepts, what might be called elements of good sense and bad sense in people’s understanding of the world. And Democrats, by and large, tend to think, if we give you enough facts, we will impress upon you the reality of the world, and you will fall under, or be brought under, through rational understandings of the world that you would vote now for progressive people, because, after all, we trust in science and rationality. Trump is challenging that and challenging it very successfully, because there is an emotional economy; that is, it is less about facts and more about grabbing people in their fears, the emotionality that goes with this. And he understands that for many, many groups of people, there are fundamental things that are going on in their lives that are understood not by facts, but by feelings, by emotion. And again, I think one of his talents -and not just his, his advisors, etc.- think of things like JD Vance, who could be the next president of the United States after Trump, but he is has a way. You know, his best-selling book was more about telling narratives about the pain people were going through. And it’s the sense of that and that is mobilized. You won’t be able to see this, but pretend that there’s a visual here with Michael Apple holding up two middle fingers. And I actually find that not just provocative, but a profound understanding. Trump is saying “To hell with you”. We don’t need to understand. These facts are so divorced from people’s real experiences, and the real experiences are I’m scared about my child. I’m scared about whether they will have a life. I’m scared economically. I’m scared about money being spent on bathrooms that have trans kids go there. And how will my child feel if my child is a daughter and someone that the child has known as a boy since grammar school comes in? Now, rationally, we can dismiss that -or we should dismiss that. That’s homophobic and transphobic and some of the worst misunderstandings we have. But Trump is very good about connecting those elements of understanding that people have, and we can see this, for instance, in his attacks on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and the attacks again, are over things like, why are we spending so much time caring about this when, basically, it’s economically privileged groups, maybe groups of color, that are getting something for nothing? Now again, there is, there is almost no data to support that claim at all. But again, it attaches itself powerfully to people’s emotional forms.

Will Brehm  14:43
And I guess that raises this question, you know, you bring up DEI -the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that have been seen all over schools and universities across the US, and has been, as you said, sort of a central pillar of the narrative that Trump has spun to peel away certain groups of people, voters, to join his large tent, let’s call it. But I wonder; now that he won the election, he will be in charge of -I mean, unless he shuts down the Department of Education- he will likely appoint a Secretary of Education and will start legislating around some of these issues. So, I guess, the question is; to what extent will Trump move from some of this rhetoric that he used in his campaign to actually making policy changes that will impact people on the ground? Do you see that happening in the next four years?

Michael Apple  15:35
Yeah. I think he’ll be much more successful. I hate to admit this. Let me preface this by saying -as many people, listeners may know- I’m not just an observer of this. I think we have two tasks; profound understanding and interruption. So, I want to understand in order to mobilize. So, when I say he is successful, I think we also have to ask, what is it about progressives that do not -what are the mistakes, misunderstandings that people like Michael Apple have made and others? Now, I think that we may get into that a bit later on when I talk just a little bit about critical pedagogy, but it seems to me that we can see this at both the levels of universities and in school districts. First, there’ll be profound disintegrations of budgets, and many things that we felt were cemented in place will no longer be cemented in place. But I think he’ll be less successful in certain things. He’ll be successful in cutting budgets, in shifting even more attention to the local choice policies, there’ll be more privatization, more judicial support, or religious choice. So, budgets that would normally go to public schooling will now go to a widened sphere of religious schooling and private schooling. We know empirically that that helps, actually, oddly enough, those people who are already sending their children to private schools. So, there’ll be stuff like that.

There will be also profound changes in courts or things that would have been considered just beyond the pale will now be considered simply people’s rights. We’ll also see, for instance, at the level of higher education, the loss of tenure. We’re already seeing that right now. So, a good example would be Florida, with New College, where it was the most progressive, experimental college in Florida. It is now the most conservative college in the south with many, many faculty members being marginalized and having to resign or losing their positions. At the level of schools, I think, again, much more aggressive about religion. We mentioned already Moms for Liberty. I think there’d be more emphasis on things that we mentioned earlier; anti-trans positions, we will have less teacher autonomy, and many, many teachers doing what I think is bad talk, meaning burnouts, that makes it a psychological trauma. It is a trauma that three out of every four teachers in the United States right now are thinking about leaving. Now, I am a former president of a teacher’s union, and I think that we are seeing the destruction of teacher unions and their power. So, in the state of Wisconsin, there was something 10 or 12 years ago called Act 10 that said that teachers’ unions disintegrate. They no longer have standing at December 31 of each year. They now must have another election at the beginning of that in January, where 51% of all members must vote to restore the union, but only about 80% of teachers’ union or any union, vote -not everyone votes. They have family responsibilities at that time of the year. So, it means that some unions have not been reinscribed as legitimate. So, I think we’re going to see much more of that.

We’re also going to see increasingly, the curriculum will be purchased. Since the best description of teaching -this is a little vulgar now and cute, but it’s a quote from a dear friend of mine who’s a secondary school teacher at a local high school. He teaches civics, interesting, and history. And I asked them, Gregory, “How was your day today?” He said, “Michael, it’s the same as every other day. I didn’t have time to pee. I didn’t have time to go to the toilet”. Now, we may laugh about this, but my own writing about intensification of teachers work leads to de-skilling of teachers. Teachers need time and emotional and intellectual resources to build stuff that is honest about the history of African American populations, about the history of liberation, about women’s histories, things that are missing to counter what we might call historical amnesia, the loss of memory. Well, that means that it’ll be a bit like during COVID, pre-packaged stuff, because there’s just too much to do, and you’re not face-to-face with kids anymore. So, we’ll see increasingly teaching will be connected to more testing, and increasingly it will be bought, and teachers will have much less autonomy. We’ll also see nationalism as a racial project increasingly seen. Now that should not surprise us. Choice programs and public choice theory, that is, that’s the intellectual basis of Trumpism; individual choice on a market. That comes at a time during the Supreme Court telling that the South could no longer find legitimacy in segregated schools. That caused a massive movement of parents from public schools to private schools and religious schools. So, we will see increasingly nationalism as a racial project and as a Christian project. So, Christian nationalism is now increasingly building material that is being purchased in many school systems, and so you’ll forgive me for going on, but this is very complicated. It’s not just one strand. All of this we’re beginning to see now.

Will Brehm  21:38
Exactly. I mean, it’s a dark picture, certainly, but you can see how it builds on sort of historical trends that we’ve seen for decades across the world, like privatization and marketization and the intensification of teachers’ work, that de-skills and de-professionalizes teachers, which then sort of challenges the way unions operate in a country like the US. And so, these trends obviously have existed long before Trump. They’re just sort of coalescing into a rather dark picture under particularly a second Trump presidency, when his team and himself have really figured out the levers of policy and government to make a lot of this happen effectively. I want to circle back to this issue of mistakes, and you said mistakes Michael Apple has made, and you’ve been studying these trends for decades. You are a renowned scholar of curriculum. You are critical in how you look at schools. You’ve said you’ve been a teacher union president and a lifelong teacher union member, I would imagine, just like myself. So, as we sort through this rubble of a pretty substantial loss for you know, the Democrats, but also a potential future that is, as you’ve just articulated, rather dark, where do we start identifying some of these mistakes that we’ve made to help us think about how to rectify them in the future?

Michael Apple  23:01
First of all, the most dangerous word in the English language is “we”. And right now, the “we” that we have built is quite limited. So, one of the ways that Trump et. al have been able to win is because they have pulled people from previous affiliations. So, a lot of people think it’s raining. So, whose umbrella do you go under? And I think that Trump, and it’s not just him, it’s a whole movement of people feel under threat economically and culturally, religiously, etc. -especially white people, but not only white people, as I mentioned earlier. And especially also white men. But not just white men, the focus, justifiably so, on the loss of bodily autonomy on the part of women, is a tragedy that is the best way to think about that is it’s murderous. Many women will die or never be able to give birth again because of these prohibitions. It is simply murderous. But I think that in many ways, the progressives have been largely rhetorical, much and I think we assume that it’s often the experts who will tell us how to interrupt these things. So, here’s a new national policy. Well, as I mentioned earlier, Trump succeeded by mobilizing at the state and local level. So, I think we have to begin to understand that one of the things that progressive forces have too often not paid attention to is; these things have always been resisted. That is, there are things going on at the ground level, and that means that people like Michael Apple and others who are perhaps too comfortable being academics, even I never have felt comfortable totally being an academic. I’m the first generation finishing secondary school in my family, and first generation to finish college. So, there’s still a part of me -and I’m not alone in this- that says there are people struggling every day, people doing critical literacy, people building mobilizations.

So, part of the answer, I think, is to mourn for the next month or so and then rebuild coalitions. And the place of teacher unions as an example, becomes powerful. So, in Milwaukee -which was the most residentially segregated city in the United States, it’s now, I think, the third most residentially segregated- the teachers union has formed the coalition with black and brown communities to defend teachers, to push for housing, to push for redistributive incomes, so that you form an alliance now to resist the state legislature and other things about funding, about the attacks on curriculum and the attacks on teacher unions, attacks on women’s bodies, all of that simultaneously. The same thing has occurred in Chicago, where there were hunger strikes and the part of communities of color in support of teacher unions, because the teachers union said part of our claims and demands will be what the community wants. So, that also means that Michael Apple and people like myself need to be what I call the secretaries of interruptive strategy.

So, in a book of mine called “Can Education Change Society?”, I lay out the tasks of the critical educator. One of them is telling the truth about what the heck is going on. It’s absolutely crucial. And it can’t be just rhetorical. There’s bad things, where, what, who? So, we have to answer that. Second is, we have to also look for spaces of possibility. So, as an example, during COVID, many things were done electronically, through hybrid things, but it also provided teachers with skills of connecting with each other. And you now have websites for critical teachers nationally and internationally that are building massively, where teachers are doing X, about redlining and its history, or about teaching science and math, connecting it to the daily life of kids and communities now being spread throughout the nation. So, our task is to look at where the spaces of possibilities that we can enter. The third is the one I just mentioned earlier, and that is, we need to be the critical secretaries of people who are interrupting this. Nobody is a puppet, and it means that a lot of the stuff that goes by the name of critical pedagogy needs to be applauded, whether I like it or not. I’m one of the first people who sort of pushed for the -however much of the stuff is rhetorical, and I think that is a deep mistake. Unless we can connect these things to questions that many on the left dismiss. What do I do on Monday? I think that we have to help answer and be taught about Paulo Freire in motion. In many ways, we are learners, not only teachers. In many ways then, how do we act to make public the successful struggles that go on?

So, you’ll forgive me for again, a bit of self-referential stuff here in the book “The Struggle for Democracy and Education”, part of the task was to be the critical secretary and say, here’s what’s going on. Here’s the mistakes that are being made. Here’s how we counter those. And one thing I think we need to do academically is to follow stuff up for 10 years. The right success sometimes turns into a failure. We need to document those failures. And there’s been a lot of failures. One example is three states have just voted not to support vouchers. There’ll be no public money going to them. How did that happen? That means those of us who, for instance, are in teacher education have a role to play as well. Let me give an example; in the teacher education program here at Wisconsin, we have three semesters where students go out into schools. For a number of years, almost a decade, we had a little less time in schools, and one semester where you’re working in community organizations. That’s quite profound. So, you are learning the community. We can learn here internationally from Brazil, in the Citizen School where teachers were paid a month salary to be guided by parents, community activists and their students in learning the culture and having the kids document what it’s like to be in these communities. It made the curriculum much more connected to daily life. That’s the educational stuff in some ways. I also think that we have to increase the we. So, people were pulled out of alliances with progressive groups. That means they can be pulled back. They need to be listened to. And rather, I’ll give just one example of this; one of my least favorite uses of technology in the history of American education is a thing called Channel One, which was a for profit TV channel that was in 43% of all middle schools and high schools in the United States, public and private. It had two minutes of commercials for Burger King Pepsi Cola, but not McDonald’s. McDonald says we don’t make money off of children. Our pacemakers stopped at the shock of them. It could not be turned off by contract. It was turned on by satellite, basically. I formed an alliance with another group of progressive educators and farmers and community organizers in the state of Wisconsin, and also fundamentalist and evangelicals to get Channel One out of schools. We formed an alliance across our ideological differences. They thought I had horns and a tail, I thought they were foolish, etc., and I didn’t want children sold as commodities for profit. And they used biblical quotes that said students are the embodiments of the best of Jesus, that is our hope. And we formed an alliance to get Channel One out of the schools of Wisconsin. That got national, and Channel One went bankrupt a number of years ago. So, I want us to think about, yes, we are polarized horribly, often in vicious ways. I think we want to say that is temporary. It is not natural. So, what can we do by expanding the we how do we listen and again, we can see how there are ways of dealing with this.

Will Brehm  31:37
I mean, that polarization point, it almost seems like Trump showed that it’s not as polarized as we had thought by being able to sort of pull together that diverse coalition. Like you said, there are groups of people that can come together and sort of despite any of the polarization that might exist.

Michael Apple  31:54
That’s hard, because he now controls more than he did before. But what it reminds me -I always say, look, the right was not as powerful 30 years ago. I come from a very politically progressive family, and my first television set in my family was to watch the Army McCarthy hearings during the years of the Red Scare. My folks were frightened to death because they were socialists. Well, we lived through that during my lifetime. When I was a graduate student, my wife was working, putting me through university for graduate school, she could not sign the lease. Women without helping with more funding. So, we had to have my wife’s father sign the lease. That would be considered grotesque now. So, there have been major gains, and I want to always remember that our cynicism, our feeling of tragedy, is important, but that leads to paralysis, and that is the worst possible thing that can happen. So, part of our task is also historical. Can we bring out the memories of what it was like when workers had pensions and what were the costs of getting it as an example. When women did have control over their lives and then didn’t, and what it took? It took years, 30 years into the forest. There’s no shortcut out. That’s part of our task.

Will Brehm  33:24
Well, Michael Apple, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It was an absolute pleasure to talk, and I look forward to seeing how we come out of that forest in the future -hopefully the near future.

Michael Apple  33:35
I truly hope so. It was a pleasure, Will.

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