Introduction

pp. 1-14

in: Stephen C. Ferguson, Philosophy of African American studies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

The dynamics of power shape public education, particularly the curriculum, politically and ideologically. As such, the educational curriculum is preeminently an interdisciplinary expression of contending class ideologies. Educational institutions function to reproduce capitalist social relations and the dominant values and beliefs of the ruling class. Public education—whether at the elementary, high school, or university level—plays a seminal ideological role in creating social consensus in bourgeois civil society. Ideas that do not conform to the dominant-class relations of production receive little or no support from the State or civil society.