Abstract
Postmodern and
post-structural theories on education highlight education as a “discursive
space that involves asymmetrical relations of power where both dominant and
subordinate groups are engaged in struggles over the production, legitimation,
and circulation of particular forms of meaning and experience (Erevelles, 2000,
pg. 30). As such, postmodern and
post-structural theorists “examine the discursive practices by which
[(individual)] student subjectivity (as intersectionally constructed by race,
class, gender, and sexuality) is produced, regulated, and even resisted within
the social context of schooling in post-industrial times” (Erevelles, 2000, pg.
25). This latter view is juxtaposed
against structural theorists who view education as an ideological apparatus for
bourgeois domination in capitalist relations of production (Bowles and Gintis,
1976; Althusser, 1980). In this work, I
argue that the former position is not an alternative to the latter. But represents an aspect of the former. That is, education in the age of neoliberal
(post-industrial) globalization serves as an ideological apparatus for
bourgeois domination through the identity politics of postmodernism and post
structuralism.
