Knowledge Legitimacy In Education

As a result of educational crisis in modern society, legitimacy of knowledge has become an outstanding issue. Michael Apple, one of the most important philosopher of education, reflected on the relationship between education, power and ideology by asking the question of "whose knowledge is of most worth?", thus connecting education with social inequality. With the starting point of issue of legitimacy of knowledge, the research of Michael Apple's thoughts of philosophy of education attempts to help to provide a better understanding of essence of educational crisis and its solution.The dissertation mainly focuses on the issue of legitimacy of knowledge, which is the foundation of the Michael Apple's thoughts of philosophy of education. After exploring the knowledge and the legitimacy of knowledge in the first chapter, we point out that Michael Apple altered the problem domain of knowledge research from the functionalism to the political and ethical directions, thus opening the new direction of critical pedagogy.The discussion of the issue of legitimacy inevitably involves the power and ideology, as the power is closely related to the issue of legitimacy and the ideology is the argumentation to the legitimacy of power. Michael Apple regards education, on the one hand, as the reproduction of power, on the other hand, as the operation of ideology. In the second chapter, the discussion of power in education mainly focuses on the two aspects, i.e. one is the political power, the other is capital power, corresponding to official knowledge and technical knowledge respectively, to see the two kinds of power how to legitimate the knowledge and reveal the mechanism of power.The third chapter discusses the process of legitimacy of knowledge completed by ideology in education from the school life and to reveal the mechanism of ideology. At the same time, it indicates the theoretical shortcomings of Apple's strategy of counter-hegemonic alliances. The fourth chapter provides a judgment and orientation to Apple's thoughts of philosophy of education after clarifying Apple's democratic education, and meanwhile discusses the ontological properties of knowledge, power, ideology in education from the historical materialism perspective, indicating the theoretical value and limitations of Apple's thoughts of philosophy of education.