Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life

Democracy's Promise and Education's Challenge

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317252474
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Sociology

This book examines the relationship between democracy and schooling and argues that schools are one of the few spheres left where youth can learn the knowledge and skills necessary to become engaged, critical citizens. Not only is the legacy of democracy addressed through the work of John Dewey and others, but the democratic possibilities of schooling are analyzed through a range of issues extending from the politics of teacher authority to the importance of student voices. These issues have only become more vital in an era of neoliberalism and "smaller government," as Giroux discusses at length in this new updated edition.

Notes

1. Schooling, Citizenship, and the Struggle for Democracy

1. Quoted in Marshall Blonsky, “Introduction: The Agony of Semiotics: Reassessing the Discipline,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. xxxii.
2. Gregory Kealey, “Herbert Gutman, 1928–1985, and the Writing of Working Class History,” Monthly Review (May 1968), p. 30.
3. I am using the term “discourse” in the manner described by Richard Terdiman as “the complexes of signs and practices which organize social existence and social reproduction. In their structured, material persistence, discourses are what give differential substance to membership of a social group or class or formation, which mediate an internal sense of belonging, and outward sense of otherness.” Richard Terdiman, Discourse-Counter-Discourse (New York: Cornell University Press 1985) p 54.
4. This is not meant to suggest that a radical discourse on democracy does not exist. It simply means that it is insufficient theoretically, and it has not been at the heart of a Left politics. David Held provides an important comment on the limitations of a Left discourse of democracy. He writes:

   Poulantzas, Macpherson and Pateman have all sought to combine and refashion insights from both the liberal and the Marxist traditions. While their efforts move political debate away from the seemingly endless and fruitless juxtaposition of liberalism with Marxism, they say very little about fundamental factors such as how, for instance, the economy is actually to be organized and related to the political apparatus, how institutions of representative democracy are to be combined with those of direct democracy, how the scope and power of administrative organizations are to be checked, how households and childcare facilities are to be related to work, how those who wish to “opt out” of the political system might do so, or how the problems posed by the ever changing international system of states could be dealt with. … Furthermore, they tend to assume that people in general want to extend the sphere of control over their lives. What if they do not want to do so? What if they do not really want to participate in the management of social and economic affairs? What if they do not wish to become creatures of democratic reason? Or, what if they wield democratic power “undemocratically” —to limit or end democracy? (David Held, Models of Democracy [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987], pp. 262–63.)

   Some recent radical efforts to redevelop a conception of radical democracy can be found in: Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer, Economic Democracy: The Challenge of the 1980s (New York: M. Sharpe, Inc., 1980); Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy: Toward a Transformation of American Society (New York: Penguin, 1983); Andrew Levine, Arguing for Socialism (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso Books, 1985); Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Harry C. Boyte and Frank Riessman, eds., The New Populism: The Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Held, Models of Democracy. Some recent examples of attempts to take up the issue of schooling and democracy include Harold Berlak’s Public Information Network (Washington University) and George Wood’s (Ohio University) Institute for Democratic Education. It is necessary to see these efforts as a response to the absence of any major discussion of democracy and schooling in the United States. These groups represent important interventions by the Left, but, unfortunately, they represent a marginal force in the overall context of how education is being defined and analyzed as part of the current educational reform movement. Of course, this serves primarily as a commentary on the power of the capitalist state to limit the range of oppositional discourses around the issue of critical democracy.
5. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975), p. 113.
6. Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1985), p. 225.
7. Ernst Bloch quoted in Anson Rabinach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique, 11 (Spring 1977), p. 8. At various times throughout this book I use the term “New Right,” which refers to two distinct political-ideological tendencies that have united in the 1980s. On the one hand, the term refers to a merging of neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the economic freedom of the market economy as a prerequisite to political freedom, with a brand of neoconservativism that argues for a nineteenth-century version of social order in which the ideas, values, and social relations of the past provide a basis for restructuring contemporary social and political life. On the other hand, the New Right represents a marriage of its traditional elitist libertarian ideology with a strain of popularist ideology that focuses on social issues such as abortion, school prayer, taxes, and other concerns that resonate with the daily experiences of working people and other groups generally ignored by the old conservatives. Combining an elitist view of economics (upholding the economic interests of the wealthy), a populist focus (a form of moral authoritarianism) on social issues, and a mythic view of the past, the New Right represents both a new alliance of traditionally disparate political factions and a new political resurgency aimed at reversing many of the political, social, and cultural changes that emerged out of the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society programs of the 1960s, and the various social and political policies put into place by progressive groups in the last twenty years. For an in-depth analysis of the character and emergence of the New Right, see the various essays in Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven, The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (New York: Pantheon, 1987) and Harvey J. Kaye, “The Use and Abuse of the Past: The New Right and the Crisis of History,” in The Socialist Register 1987, ed. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch, and John Saville (London: Merlin Press, 1987), pp. 332–64.
8. Two important qualifications must be made here. First, by Left critics I mean Left in the generic sense to refer to an amalgam of progressive, liberals, social democrats and radical populists who struggle for social and economic justice within the wider goal of furthering a radical democratic society. Second, at the heart of the “crisis of democracy” in America and elsewhere are not only ideological issues, but also the question of who controls economic resources, wealth, and has the power to set economic and social priorities within the wider society. Capitalist exploitation rooted in economic inequalities is not something for which the Left is directly responsible. It is simply not an actor on this terrain. Moreover, operating within asymmetrical relations of power, the Left does not have an equal footing in shaping the agendas that constitute the cultural terrain. But at the same time, it has failed in its various public spheres to attract and mobilize a following precisely because of the limited nature of its ideological appeal. For a serious debate on this issue, see the exchange among Lillian Rubin and Richard Lichtman, on the one hand, and Christopher Lasch, on the other, in Tikkun, 1:2 (1986), pp. 85–93. Also see Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Edu cation under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate over Schooling (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985). It is also worth noting as Jost Halfmann has pointed out that the New Right has taken some central concepts concerning democracy and capitalism and assimilated them into their own ideological framework. He writes:

   The neo conservatives have seized an idea which the Left has largely given up, namely, that bourgeois democracy and the capitalist mode of production stand in a precarious and immanently immutable relation of tension to each other. The difference made by the conservatives is that they hold the welfare state and mass democracy rather than the productive relations responsible for the evils of modern societies. (Jost Halfmann, “The German Left and Democracy,” New German Critique, 33 [Spring 1985], p. 174.)

9. Richard Hanson, The Democratic Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 418.
10. Douglas Kellner and Harry O’Hara, “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique, 9 (Fall 1976), p. 22.
11. Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986), p. 33.
12. “Orientation,” The Social Frontier, 1 (October 1934), pp. 3–4; see also James M. Giarelli, “The Social Frontier, 1934–1943: Retrospect and Prospect,” unpublished paper presented at the American Educational Studies Association Annual Meeting, Colorado Springs, Colorado, November 1980, 20 pp.
13. Needless to say, a number of theoretical ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Democracy’s Promise and Education’s Challenge
• Schooling, Citizenship, and the Struggle for Democracy
• Schooling and the Politics of Ethics: Beyond Conservative and Liberal Discourses
• Authority, Ethics, and the Politics of Schooling
• Schooling and the Politics of Student Voice
• Literacy, Critical Pedagogy, and Empowerment
• Teacher Education and Democratic Schooling
• Conclusion: Beyond the Politics of Anti-Utopianism in Education
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author