The Politics of Education

A Critical Introduction

Kenneth J. Saltman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138242500
• eBook ISBN: 9781351110372
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Politics of Education provides an introduction to both the political dimensions of schooling and the politics of recent educational reform debates. The book offers undergraduates and starting graduate students in education an understanding of numerous dimensions of the contested field of education, addressing questions of political economy, class, cultural politics, race, and gender. Noted scholar Kenneth Saltman introduces contemporary educational debates and seriously considers views across the political spectrum from the vantage point of critical education, emphasizing schooling for broader social equality and justice.

Updates to this second edition work through contemporary reform debates that include topics such as the reauthorization of ESEA, race and diversity, standardized testing and common core, and classroom technology. With opportunities for readers to engage in deeper discussion through Questions for Further Discussion and a Glossary of key terms, The Politics of Education remains a much-needed, accessible primer, providing the critical tools needed to make sense of the current politics of education.

1

The Cultural Politics of Education

The Introduction distinguished between conservative, liberal, and critical versions of the politics of education, drawing a broad distinction between the socially transformative aims of the critical approach and the social accommodationist aims of both the liberal and conservative perspectives. The cultural politics of education can be understood through a similar matrix. Both the liberal and conservative perspectives see culture in the tradition of Matthew Arnold as a collection of the “best and brightest” of human endeavors—ideas and art. Education in this accommodationist view is centrally about transmitting this thing called culture to the young.

These issues came to a head in the so-called culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which largely focused on education. During this time period, conservatives like Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch pushed back against what they saw as liberal trends in education. Although both liberals and conservatives believed in culture as a set of canonical texts to be transmitted, liberals had begun to advocate for expanding the canon to include works by historically marginalized cultural groups including women, African Americans, and Latinos. Conservatives pushed back by stridently defending a curriculum based on the “great books” of Eurocentric tradition. In books like Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy they likewise defended traditional interpretations of historical events that had recently begun to be reexamined from a multicultural perspective.

Criticalists took yet a third approach. Like liberals, they embraced multiculturalism but also sought to promote a view of culture as inherently political, highly contested, and interwoven with class interests and power struggles; Donaldo Macedo’s Literacies of Power: What Americans Are Not Allowed to Know represents one of the finest efforts to expound this view and offers a critical counterpunch to Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. Like conservatives, criticalists saw culture as politically contested but sought to question the Western tradition rather than simply reproduce it. For many cultural conservatives, the preservation of cultural values or rather “purity” and avoidance of cultural “decadence” is of primary value. In this view the cultural traditions of the past must be enshrined and defended. For criticalists the cultural traditions of the past are no more sacred than the cultural practices of the present, and all must be subject to interrogation in terms of whose interests and perspectives they represent. For example, while criticalists see numerous values in a classical text such as Plato’s Republic, they also see it as requiring interpretation in terms of the authoritarian values it promotes, the social relationships it suggests, and the way that the social and individual values relate to contemporary public problems.

Many criticalists want to take all forms of cultural production seriously in terms of how they function pedagogically and politically. Consequently, not only should a classical work of philosophy be taken seriously but so should hip hop music, which mobilizes the desires, stimulates the interests, and speaks to the dreams of many people today. The point is not that these cultural works are equal or need to be hierarchically ranked in terms of their cultural importance or classified into categories of “high” and “low.” The critical perspective shifts the question altogether to a primary focus on what cultural works do as the products of meaning-making practices and processes. This is the political question of culture: what do cultural products do? The poetic question of culture asks what cultural works mean. When we ask what cultural works do, we are asking how their meanings affirm or contest already existing sets of meanings (or discourses), how in a given context a cultural work tends to have what Stuart Hall calls a preferred meaning yet how this preferred meaning is never finally fixed, and how such preferred meanings mobilize people to act in the material world.

Today there is another wave of push-back against critical tendencies. Liberal experts in education such as Linda Darling-Hammond feel that it is time for liberals and everybody else to “get over the curriculum wars.” Even Diane Ravitch, who has come to defend public schooling against privatization, declares the need to get past the curriculum wars. Ravitch retains cultural conservative values, positioning privatization as a threat to the “strong curriculum” that can be codified through common core standards. Other liberals such as Jonathan Kozol, Mike Rose, Richard Rothstein, and Richard Kahlenberg advocate against privatization and excessive testing.

But all of these thinkers, liberal and conservative alike, advocate essentially the same thing: better practices, more rigor, essentially carrying on the educational practices of the past but simply doing a better job of it. They make arguments for “strengthening” public schooling (avoiding privatization, stopping the overemphasis on testing) while ignoring what criticalists consider to be the most crucial dimension of public schooling: cultural politics.

Cultural Politics: Stuart Hall’s Constructivist Theory of Culture

Cultural politics is at the heart of the critical perspective on education. The concept emerged in the field of cultural studies. One of the leading figures in that field was Stuart Hall, who argued that culture is about shared meanings that are produced through dialogue, albeit always in unequal exchanges. In Hall’s perspective, for a sign, a representation, or a practice to become meaningful, there must be a shared understanding about it. However, meanings change. Hall challenges the idea of cultural meanings as being inherent in a text, a sign, or an object that transcends time and space. Signs, symbols, and representations do not speak for themselves. They require interpretations and the interpretations become meaningful in particular contexts. Cultural politics is the struggle to make meaning among competing parties and a recognition of the inevitable meaning-making dimensions of human practices.

We can see how meaning is context-specific through the examples of some well-known symbols. A swastika in contemporary U.S. culture is largely seen as being a symbol of the Nazis. It evokes the sadism of the Nazis in World War II, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the ongoing threat of neo-Nazism around the world. However, prior to the 1920s when the Nazis made it their symbol, the swastika was associated with American Indians, Hinduism, and Buddhism and carried none of the connotations of racism and oppression that it has since garnered. In fact, if one travels to countries that are predominantly Hindu or Buddhist one can still find the swastika displayed as an ancient symbol related to those religions. Stuart Hall uses the example of the British flag, the Union Jack. The Union Jack was traditionally displayed alongside white people and became a symbol of white “Britishness.” Now it can be seen waved by black athletes in international competitions, and its meaning is reworked. It suggests not only Britishness but the relationship between race, global competition, and excellence, among other commonly linked meanings that are tied to the flag.

Stuart Hall rejects cultural meaning as being fixed, universal, and timeless. He also rejects an understanding of cultural meaning as the result of authorial intention. Just because an author writes something with a meaning in mind or a director makes a film with a meaning in mind, how the book or film will be interpreted cannot be strictly determined or assured. Instead, communities of interpretation make sense of the cultural product. Hall calls this preferred readings—interpretations that are likely at a particular time and place as opposed to fixed for all time. There is an indeterminacy at the core of signs, symbols, images, and representations. This indeterminacy of meanings leaves open the possibility for people to make different interpretations and for the meanings of representations to change and be changed. In fact, for Hall we are, all the time, involved in meaning-making practices, what he calls signifying practices. These signifying practices include not only language but everything that we do that becomes meaningful or “signifies” in a community.

Hall’s constructivist theory of culture also offers a version of selfhood that emphasizes the constructedness of identity. Identities in this view are not essential or authentic but rather are the result of the process of identification with discursive subject positions—that is with the meanings that have been made through signifying practices and that an individual can occupy. Today in many domains the constructedness of identity is a common assumption. For example, gender and sexuality are largely understood as identifications or subject positions that a person can occupy but that the gender or sexual identity is not fixed or grounded by say biological reproductive capacity. The popular image and acceptance of transexual identity has, for example, contributed to the greater establishment of the constructivist view of gender and sexuality. However, while many people today recognize that race too is a social construction, there has been a growing rightist project to return to racial essentialism. Racial essentialism can be found among white supremacists claiming the inherent superiority of white racial identity and inferiority of non-white racial identity. Racial essentialism can also be found among proponents of some left identity politics where identity positions are claimed to be inherently guilty or innocent—white people and men for example, are sometimes alleged to be inherently oppressive by virtue of their identities. Such views claiming essential identity fail to explain how some people hold views that do not cohere with others of that identity position. As well, such views fail to comprehend how identity positions can be rearticulated through education. As Giroux has persuasively argued there need to be re-articulations of identity positions in forms that are more liberatory and less oppressive, which can be taught and learned. For example, if race is a social construction then the progressive task is to formulate anti-racist white identity and to do the educative work of making anti-racist identifications.

Cultural Politics and the “Responsible” Teacher

Hall’s and Giroux’s ideas on culture are highly significant for teachers as cultural workers. Cultural workers are those people who are engaged in public meaning-making activities, and teachers are key public figures in the making of meaning for young people. Teachers inevitably make pedagogical choices. When they choose a curriculum, plan lessons, and teach, then teachers become responsible for what meanings they make in the classroom. We can think of “responsibility” in three ways here.

First, teachers are always responding to already existing broader public discourses. That is, they are entering a context in which there are already existing ideas, values, and ideologies about a whole range of things from nation, gender, and race to leisure, science, and nature, to name but a few broader public discourses. Teachers are responding by affirming or contesting existing broader public discourses in what they say, write, and do. Teachers are inevitably producing identifications for students and are implicated in the pedagogical formation of identity.

Second, teachers are also responsible for the ethical and political implications of what they knowingly or unwittingly affirm or contest in schools and classrooms. Their meaning-making has both school-based and broader social implications, which is why educational theorist Paulo Freire emphasizes praxis—the ongoing process of reflecting on and theorizing one’s experiences and actions. As Henry Giroux explains, the issue is not whether or not teachers’ practices are based in theories; rather, it is the extent to which teachers understand what theoretical underpinnings and assumptions are behind their practices.

A third sense of teacher responsibility holds teachers in a relationship of responding to students and the social contexts inhabited by teachers and students such that teaching and learning is understood as being dialogic and driven by the exchange of meanings. Teachers are responsible for taking seriously the subjective experiences and histories that students bring to the pedagogical encounter. They are also responsible for helping students to interpret those experiences in terms of the social context and social forces that inform and produce those experiences. Through dialogue and the exchange of meanings between teachers and students, the subjective experiences of both can be understood as produced by broader objective conditions. Moreover, through dialogue, subjective experiences and particular contexts can be interpreted as a means of shaping and transforming the objective social conditions and future experiences.

The responsibilities of teachers in these three senses are all related to an awareness of cultural politics. They differ radically from the transmission-oriented idea of teacher responsibility that holds teachers responsible for delivering knowledge that experts elsewhere deem of most value. In that disciplinary idea of teacher responsibility, teachers must simply enforce the right knowledge.

Cultural Politics and Class: Pierre Bourdieu and the Forms of Capital

If cultural politics is the process of meaning-making among competing parties, who are these parties that compete for cultural meaning? Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu believed that economic class was a critical category in the competition for cultural meaning. He offered important insights into the three ways that class privilege is transmitted from generation to generation.

The first way that class privilege is transmitted is through money, the traditional meaning of the word capital. Parents bequeath financial wealth to their children in several ways. They purchase elite private schooling, allow them to attend cultural events, make investments, and simply give them money. All of these things constitute a form of heritable privilege.

A second way that class privilege is transmitted is through social capital. Social capital refers to the social networks that individuals are able to join that allow for social benefit. For example, parents who are members of the wealthy professional class share social networks that give them advantages that those outside their network don’t enjoy. They exchange knowledge of how to gain entry into prestigious schools. They share tips on how to take advantage of public resources. Their alumni status may give their children a leg up on admission to universities. And university graduates themselves enter the social networks of alumni associations, which may transform into real capital in the form of coveted jobs and connections to gain capital. In all of these cases, knowing other people of privilege translates into privilege for oneself and one’s children. Social capital is, in effect, the people one knows.

The third way in which privilege is transmitted is through cultural capital. Cultural capital refers to the knowledge, tastes, and dispositions that are socially valued and rewarded and the tools for appropriating them. Bourdieu distinguished between objectified, embodied, and institutionalized forms of cultural capital. Objectified forms of cultural capital are physical objects like works of art or books. Embodied forms of cultural capital are not physical but intellectual: possessing the tastes and opinions that are rewarded in society. Institutional forms of cultural capital refers to institutional recognition like college degrees, board certifications, and the like. Again, the possession of all of these forms of cultural capital results in continued privileges for the possessor.

Cultural capital for Bourdieu begins in the home and is rewarded or punished in the schools. For example, an infant with parents from the professional class is regularly read to at home. The infant learns familiarity with language but also learns that reading and books are familiar, that books are something that mother and father value, and so on. When this child arrives at school, she already has a particular disposition toward book learning, understands the book as being important, associates it with familial care. Right from the beginning, the school rewards this “second nature” disposition that the child has toward the book. The working-class or poor student who is unfamiliar with books from the beginning is at a disadvantage in an institution that rewards book learning. Such unfamiliarity may then be the basis for the student being subjected to a series of sorting and sifting techniques. Some may be as simple as observation: the teacher notices that some students demonstrate interest in books and others don’t. These dispositions become the basis for mistakenly naturalizing as intelligence or diligence what are in fact differently distributed forms of cultural capital. Likewise, students of professional parents may be more comfortable with test-taking. Tests demand of professional class students much of what they already know and find second nature to come to know, while the same tests demand of working-class and poor students what they do not know and find alien to come to know.

Perhaps the working-class or culturally subordinate child has even learned implicitly or explicitly that books are associated with a culture of power from which the child is excluded. Bourdieu terms this experience of having one’s culture, knowledge, language, tastes, and dispositions devalued “symbolic violence.” Symbolic violence is not only an external force on individuals but also involves the student internalizing the “rules of the game.” So, for example, after a short time of being in the school dominated by professional-class knowledge, tastes, and dispositions, the working-class student learns to judge herself as inferior, lazy, and uninte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Are the “Politics” in the Politics of Education? Liberal, Conservative, and Critical Perspectives on the Politics of Education
• 1. The Cultural Politics of Education
• 2. The Political Economy of Education
• 3. The Political Psychology of Education
• 4. Hegemony
• 5. Disciplinary Power, Race, and Examinations
• 6. Biopolitics and Education
• 7. Neoliberalism and Corporate School Reform
• 8. The Politics of Gender in the Current Education Reforms
• 9. The Politics of Globalization and Education
• 10. The Politics of the Status Quo or a New Common School Movement?
• Case Studies
• Glossary
• About the Author
• Index