Critical theory and the politics of culture and voice: Rethinking the discourse of educational research

I believe that there is a more productive starting point for constructing a model of educational research. It is a model that is part of a tradition of radical scholarship that has emerged in North America, England, Australia, Latin America, and France within the last two decades and has taken as one of its fundamental concerns the need to re-emphasize the centrality of politics andRadical critics of education provided a: variety of useful models of analysis and research to challenge traditional educational ideology. Against the conservative claim that schools transmitted objective knowledge, radical critics developed theories of the hidden curriculum as well as theories of ideology that identified the specific interests underlying different knowledge forms (Giroux and Purpel, 1983; Oakes, 1985). Rather than viewing knowledge as objective, as something to be merely transmitted to students, radical theorists argued that knowledge was a particular representation of the dominant culture, a privileged discourse that was constructed through a selective process of emphases and exclusions (Apple, 1982). Against the claim that schools were only instructional sites, radical critics pointed to the transmission and reproduction of a dominant culture in schools.