Can Education Change Society? is a somewhat different kind of book than others
I have written. I did not want to write a largely theoretical book. After all, I’d
already spent a good deal of time in various books and articles analyzing whether
education had some independent power or was totally determined by dominant
economic and cultural relations. I had also partly answered this
question by showing in greater detail the ways in which rightist movements
had employed education as part of a larger radical reconstruction of the priorities
of this society (Apple 2006). There is still some serious theoretical work with
which this book engages, especially later on in this introductory chapter and in
Chapter 2. (Be patient. This work is important grounding for my chapters on
critical people and programs in the rest of the volume.) But the aim is not to
advance and justify a new over-arching argument. Nor is it to give us the one
ultimate answer to the question of whether education can change society. Indeed,
it became clear to me while writing the chapters in this book, that there is no one
ultimate answer—unless we can be satisfied with something such as this: “It
depends. And it depends on a lot of hard and continued efforts by many people.”
This may be frustrating for you and certainly for me. But it is honest.