The Critical Turn in Education

From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race

Isaac Gottesman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138781344
• eBook ISBN: 9781317670957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Critical Turn in Education traces the historical emergence and development of critical theories in the field of education, from the introduction of Marxist and other radical social theories in the 1960s to the contemporary critical landscape. The book begins by tracing the first waves of critical scholarship in the field through a close, contextual study of the intellectual and political projects of several core figures including, Paulo Freire, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux. Later chapters offer a discussion of feminist critiques, the influx of postmodernist and poststructuralist ideas in education, and critical theories of race.

While grounded in U.S. scholarship, The Critical Turn in Education contextualizes the development of critical ideas and political projects within a larger international history, and charts the ongoing theoretical debates that seek to explain the relationship between school and society. Today, much of the language of this critical turn has now become commonplace—words such as "hegemony," "ideology," and the term "critical" itself—but by providing a historical analysis, The Critical Turn in Education illuminates the complexity and nuance of these theoretical tools, which offer ways of understanding the intersections between individual identities and structural forces in an attempt to engage and overturn social injustice.

1 REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769967-2

In the winter 1985 issue of Harvard Educational Review (HER), Martha Montero-Sieburth, then an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a review of Paulo Freire’s new book The Politics of Education. “Paulo Freire is known primarily for his contributions to the education of illiterate adults in the Third World,” noted her opening sentence. “In his most recent book, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation, however, his pedagogical philosophy, experiences, and methodology extend far beyond geographic boundaries; they encompass the political realities of the oppressed everywhere” (Montero-Sieburth, 1985, p. 457). Six pages in length, the review is a broad discussion of Freire’s life and ideas and a forceful call for scholars in the field to engage his approach to education. “Freire’s politics put history back into our hands,” she concluded. “Beyond the power of the alphabet is the power of knowledge and social action. This book enlarges our vision with each reading, until the meanings become our own” (p. 463).

For a contemporary reader familiar with scholarship in critical educational studies, which almost always locates the origin of critical educational scholarship in the 1970 publication of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the review might be puzzling—Montero-Sieburth’s comments read as an introduction of Freire to the educational community. “Now, in The Politics of Education,” she noted, “Freire sparks further discussion on the major issues in education by bringing his writings before an English-speaking audience…. While much of what is said is not new, the particular collection of articles updates Freire’s political and pedagogical message for U.S. audiences” (pp. 457–458). Indeed, the collection of over a dozen loosely connected essays, articles, dialogues, and commentaries consists of work primarily written in the early and mid- 1970s, including two articles Freire originally published in HER. This was not new work. However, as the first of a series of books Freire published in the new Critical Studies in Education Series with publisher Bergin & Garvey, which he co-edited with Henry Giroux, The Politics of Education was clearly intended to launch Freire into educational conversations in the United States. At the time, Freire was marginal in the field.

Today, Paulo Freire is invoked, discussed, and cited in a wide range of educational scholarship, from literacy education to school reform. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a mainstay in education courses across the country. While John Dewey is likely the most recognized scholar in the field, Paulo Freire is probably not far behind. For radical education scholars in particular, Freire is the touchstone voice—scholarship espousing social justice is almost always in conversation with his critical educational approach. However, as this chapter details, there is a strong dissonance between the dominant perception of Freire’s role in the history of the turn to critical scholarship in the field, which is one of instigator if not originator, and the paper trail of evidence that suggests otherwise. In the process of charting an alternative history of Freire’s reception in the field, this chapter also demonstrates how the positioning of Freire as the instigator of critical educational scholarship has led to contemporary problems with the way scholars engage his ideas, particularly those articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As critics such as Rich Gibson (2007) have noted, mere mention of Freire too often substitutes for an engagement with his work. Arguably his core theoretical contribution to revolutionary thought—that critical education should be the central feature of revolutionary movement building—is thus rarely engaged. This chapter helps us understand some of the historical reasons why this might be the case, and concludes by urging critical educational scholars to revisit his work with a close eye to context.

Exile and the Critical Marxist Tradition

Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil in 1921 and raised in a middle-class Catholic family.¹ In 1947, after already having worked as an advocate for workers and as a teacher, Freire completed a degree in law at the University of Recife and began working for the division of Education and Culture of the Social Service of Industry (SESI), an official office of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, of which Recife is the capital. It is while at SESI that Freire began to focus on adult literacy and the relationships between education and social change. In the mid-1950s, while directing programs at SESI, Freire returned to the University of Recife to complete a doctorate in education, with an emphasis on history and philosophy of education. He received his degree in 1959 and soon after became a faculty member at the university.

In the early 1960s, while teaching at Recife and working with various state agencies and social movements, Freire began to develop a method of literacy education for which he would soon become famous. The method was premised on the idea that literacy best emerges when instruction is grounded in life experiences, including the political reality of one’s own position in society. Freire’s method proved so successful in initial implementation that many within the growing national Popular Education Movement, of which Freire was a part, began to believe that it could rapidly increase literacy throughout Brazil. Progressive Brazilian President Joao Goulart agreed, and in 1963 appointed Freire head of a national literacy campaign. With a military coup in 1964, however, imminent plans to feature Freire’s method in the national campaign came to an abrupt halt. After being imprisoned twice for a total of over two months because of his political activism, Freire left Brazil for Bolivia, which experienced a military coup of its own only 20 days later. Freire promptly left Bolivia for Chile, where in late 1964 he began working on agrarian reform and adult education for the new populist Christian-Democrat government. Freire also began teaching at the University of Santiago.

As John Holst (2006) has convincingly documented, while in Chile (1964–1969), Freire became thoroughly engrossed in Marxist revolutionary thought, which in the mid-1960s was influencing the ideas of national liberation movements across the globe, including in Latin America (Castaneda, 1993; Prashad, 2007). It is thus unsurprising that in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other work of the period, Freire was influenced by the work of classic revolutionary thinkers, such as V.I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, and more contemporary ones, such as Che Guevara and Regis Debray. Freire was participating in a vibrant conversation about leadership and revolutionary movement building that was central to the period’s radical thought.

Like many of his contemporaries, in addition to the revolutionary Marxist tradition, Freire also became deeply influenced by the critical Marxist tradition. Emerging in the inter-war years, critical Marxism began as a reaction to a historical determinism and positivism dominant within, first, Second International Marxism, whose chief theorists Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Georgi Plekhanov all read and interpreted Marx through Engels’ scientific socialist lens (e.g. reading Marx’s Capital through Engels’ Anti-Duhring), and second, within the young Soviet state, which grew increasingly authoritarian after Stalin’s quick rise to power following the death of Lenin in 1924.² Central figures in this turn were: Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Ernst Bloch in the early 1920s; Antonio Gramsci in the late 1920s and early 1930s; and, from the 1920s on, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and others affiliated with the Institute for Social Research (commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School), which was founded at the University of Frankfurt in Germany in 1923 and went into exile in 1933, first to Geneva, then in 1935 to New York City, to escape the rise of National Socialism. It was Max Horkheimer, who became director of the institute in 1930, who, in a 1937 essay titled “Traditional and Critical Theory,” coined the term “Critical Theory.”

Though considered connected to a revival of interest in an early ‘Hegelian’ Marx, it is notable that some of the foundational work in critical Marxist thought was actually written prior to the publication of most of Marx’s early writings, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which were published in 1932. Thus for some, such as Lukacs, whose History and Class Consciousness (published in 1923) is often said to have anticipated the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the publication of Marx’s early writings clarified long-held beliefs.³ For all Marxists who took the critical path, the writings revealed an approach that thoroughly critiqued, in Marx’s terms, the scientific dialectical materialism that had become Marxist orthodoxy. In these works, Marx posited a historical materialism grounded in humanism, history as a product of human agency, embraced the Kantian philosophical tradition of critique, wrote about alienation, and held a commitment to dialectical thought as a methodological approach to understanding social relations. As political theorist Stephen Eric Bronner (2002) has noted of this tradition:

Its objective is to foster reflexivity, a capacity for fantasy, and a new basis for praxis in an increasingly alienated world. Critical theory, in this way, stands diametrically opposed to economic determinism and any stage theory of history. It originally sought to examine the various “meditations” between base and superstructure. It engaged in a revision of Marxian categories and an anachronistic theory of revolution in order to expose what inhibited revolutionary practice and its emancipatory outcome. Critical theory wished to push beyond the stultifying dogma and collectivism of what became known as “actually existing socialism”. The ideological and institutional framework of oppression was always thrust to the forefront and made the target of attack.

(p. 5)

Although somewhat underground for many years, the critical tradition emerged en force in the 1960s. In an effort to rescue Marxian critique from the crude orthodoxy still dominant within the Soviet Bloc and to develop insightful theory that illuminated the ideological structure of the social order, radicals across the globe who were mobilizing against an expanding capitalist social order turned to this critical tradition. Freire participated in this reemergence, with affiliates of the humanist Praxis group in Yugoslavia (e.g. Gajo Petrovic), the Frankfurt School (e.g. Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, & Eric Fromm), and a range of independent socialist humanists (e.g. Karl Kosik & Lucian Goldmann) being particularly influential on his thinking.⁴ As Denis Goulet noted in 1973 about Freire’s 1965 book Education as the Practice of Freedom⁵:

Were the piece to be written today, I feel certain that its title would become ‘Education as the Praxis of Liberation’. For although Freire’s earlier work does view action as praxis, the precise symbiosis between reflective action and critical theorizing is the fruit of later works, especially Cultural Action for Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Similarly, Freire’s notion of freedom has always been dynamic and rooted in the historical process by which the oppressed struggle unremittingly to “extroject” (the term is his) the slave consciousness which oppressors have “interjected” into the deepest recess of their being. Yet in recent years Freire has grown ever more attentive to the special oppression masked by the forms of democratic “freedom” or civil “liberty.” Accordingly, he now emphasizes liberation as being both a dynamic activity and the partial conquest of those engaged in a dialogical education.

(Goulet, 1973, pp. vii–viii)

Though participating in a revolutionary Marxist milieu, by the end of the 1960s Freire’s “critical theorizing” and more nuanced emphasis on liberation was philosophically grounded in and contributing to the critical Marxist tradition.⁶

Following this tradition, Freire’s conceptualization of what it means to be critical emerged out of the ontological position that there is an objective reality that is created and can thus be transformed by humans: Dehumanization is not a historical fact. “Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as a product of human action,” wrote Freire, “so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality (which in the ‘inversion of the praxis’ turns back upon them and conditions them) then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity” (Freire, 1970e, p. 36). Once objective reality is acknowledged, dehumanization can be recognized or unveiled, reflected upon, and acted against. This is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• The Critical Social Thought Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Revolutionary Movements
• 2 Political Economy and the Academic Left
• 3 Ideology and Hegemony
• 4 Critical Pedagogy
• 5 Situated Knowledge and Feminist Standpoint Epistemology
• 6 Critical Theories of Race
• Conclusion
• References
• Index