Power/knowledge/pedagogy

The Meaning Of Democratic Education In Unsettling Times

Dennis Carlson, Michael Apple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780813391380
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429977695
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The essays in this volume explore the educational implications of unsettling shifts in contemporary culture associated with postmodernism. These shifts include the fragmentation of established power blocs, the emergence of a politics of identity, growing inequalities between the haves and the have-nots in a new global economy, and the rise in influence of popular culture in defining who we are. In the academy, postmodernism has been associated with the emergence of new theoretical perspectives that are unsettling the way we think about education. These shifts, the authors suggest, are deeply contradictory and may lead in divergent political directions?some of them quite dangerous. Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy examines these issues with regard to four broad domains of educational inquiry: state educational policy and curriculum reform, student identity formation, the curriculum as a text, and critical pedagogy. The book contributes to the dialogue on the forging of a new commonsense discourse on democratic educational renewal, attuned to the changing times in which we live.

Part One
State Educational Policy and Curriculum Reform in Unsettling Times

2 Education in Unsettling Times: Public Intellectuals and the Promise of Cultural Studies

Henry A. Giroux

The United States appears, for many of us, to be going through one of the most startling and potentially dangerous historical junctures it has faced since the tumultuous "Red Scare" of the 1920s. The signs are evident at all levels of society. At the local level, fear and racial hatred appear to be inspiring a major backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement as affirmative action is openly attacked and anti-immigration sentiment and legislation sweep the nation. At the state level, financial cutbacks and the restructuring of the labor force have weakened unions and vastly undercut social services for the most vulnerable, including the poor, women with infant children, and older citizens who rely on Medicare and other such benefits. Across the nation, we are witnessing increased discrimination and violence. This includes well-organized attempts by conservatives to limit the rights and gains made by women as well as increasing acts of violence against women, gays, lesbians, and racial minorities. Similarly, racial and gender discrimination are being accompanied by an increase in cultural censorship coupled with an attack on those public sites instrumental in fighting AIDS, poverty, and the destruction of the environment. One important subtext of this conservative backlash is the increasingly powerful attempt to decimate the public school system as part of a larger assault on the democratic foundations of political, social, and cultural life.

As the concept of the public is increasingly attacked by the various factions on the right, a mounting criticism has emerged over the purpose of higher education along with the role that educators might play as critically engaged public intellectuals. This is most evident in the barrage of critiques initiated in the popular press and by right-wing cultural critics against multiculturalism, political correctness, and a variety of other forces that are allegedly undermining the traditional imperative of the university to teach "the best that has been thought and known in the world."¹

In responding to the assault by neoconservatives on the university as a critical public culture, left theorists such as Joan Scott have recognized that what is at stake in this battle goes far beyond the specific issues of freedom of speech in the academy, affirmative action, or challenging the canon.² More pointedly, the neoconservative, Reagan-Bush assault waged during the last decade has attempted to undermine those aspects of public culture which are fostered by and in turn promote critical and oppositional agency. It comes as no surprise that neoconservatives have chosen higher education as one of the central sites on which to wage such a battle.³

Paradoxically, while the university is being attacked for allowing tenured radicals to take over the humanities and undermine the authority of the traditional canon, there is the simultaneous implication that the university should not assume the role of a critical, public sphere actively engaged in addressing the social problems of either the larger society or the broader global landscape. On one level, the undermining of the university as a public space can be seen both in the fiscal cuts that have plagued universities across the country and in the increasing belief that issues that are central to public life need not be addressed within the hallowed halls of higher education. Neoconservative hardliners such as Hilton Kramer go so far as to deny the relevance of both the university as a public sphere and the assumption that academics can operate as public intellectuals. He writes: "The great mistake is to identify public intellectuals with academics. Most of the serious intellectual discourses for some time have not come out of the academy. The academy is intellectually dead."⁴

Somewhat moderate conservatives and liberals take a more cautious line and argue that universities should simply impart knowledge that is outside of the political and cultural whirlwinds of the time. The crisis facing the university as a crucial public sphere is also evident in the rhetoric of a currently popular group of diverse conservative public intellectuals who are located and supported financially in the worlds of government, private foundations, and the popular press. Right-wing ideologues such as Newt Gingrich are now touted as exemplary intellectuals who will apply a no-nonsense, marketplace approach to running the commanding institutions of civic life. Gingrich's Contract with America is really a contract on America. It's about the death of democratic vision, a willfully innocent, anti-intellectual individualism based on the film character Forrest Gump and the cult of Christian capitalism. Moral authority in the new conservative view of the world appears to derive its claim to public memory from a nostalgic rendering of the traditional values expressed in the 1930s film Boys Town. Underpinning the right-wing claim to public memory is the marriage of a nostalgic return to the archaic traditions of a golden age when blacks and women knew their place, and a culture of racism buttressed an appeal to a eugenicist discourse parading under the mantle of scientific empiricism. In this scenario Pat Buchanan joins Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and others who justify economic, political, and social inequality "by attributing it to innate, and therefore supposedly ineradicable, differences in intelligence."⁵

Debates about education are increasingly addressed within a broader social and policymaking context in which racist discourse and representations parade as exemplars of freedom of speech. Similarly, democracy is undermined, if not overtly derided, as the new right publicly proclaims that it is waging a "counter cultural war" against forms of social dissent inspired by 1960s radicals. Within this formulation, the concept of social indignation becomes the preserve of privileged white men who see themselves as being under assault by the hostile forces of history. Given the current umbrage against almost any notion of the public that speaks to critical intellectual exchange, dialogue, or theoretical difference, it is not surprising that universities, public schools, National Public Radio and the National Endowments of the Arts are under siege by a Congress whose power now resides in the hands of mostly evangelical republicans.

The "counter cultural revolution" is not being waged only in Congress. It is also being conducted over the airwaves, especially talk radio. What counts as education for many Americans appears to be found in the spawning of national talk radio shows largely run by right-wing hosts. If America is turning right, this is most evident in the rise of right-wing talk radio shows from 200 a decade ago to over 1,000 in the 1990s. Moreover, most of the shows are conservative and evangelical in political orientation and "according to one poll, 44 percent of Americans regard talk radio as their prime source of political information."⁶ The king of the medium, Rush Limbaugh, is "estimated to reach an audience of 20 million people a week on 660 stations, all tuning in to a daily monologue of Clinton-bashing and welfare-trashing, punctuated by Limbaugh's much-imitated riff, the angry Cry of the put-upon white male."⁷ In this case, talk radio becomes an important educational pubic sphere and provides the conditions for a resurgent racism along with an aggressive attack on any viable notion of critical educational work. Beyond the overt racism of New York City talk show host Bob Grant, who refers to African Americans as savages, talk radio unites a variety of right-wing, public intellectuals in a common battle against the perils of deconstruction, postmodernism, cultural studies, black studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, poststructuralism, and other alleged theoretical insurgencies. In addition to promoting a resurgent racism, right-wing intellectuals are waging a war against what Newt Gingrich and others label as cultural elites, a code word for anyone who is critical of the status quo. Moreover, the attack on cultural elites appears to be a thinly veiled critique of university academics (as well as public school teachers) who address the pressing social issues of the times.⁸

While the theoretical particulars are different, a similar critique of critical intellectuals in the university has emerged among populist journalists and a number of left theoreticians. The latter is evident in Russell Jacoby's nostalgic lament in The Last Intellectuals about the decline of public culture in the United States and the rise of academic intellectuals who allegedly write in arcane languages and largely forsake any viable political intervention into public life.⁹ In this view, critical thought nurtured in the halls of higher education through the study of institutions, texts, and various forms of representations offers very little in the way of understanding or promoting concrete struggle over pressing social problems. A very similar critique has emerged in recent years among journalists in the popular media who argue that the university has become a repository of insular elitism marked by linguistic-ideological games far removed from the interests and concerns of everyday life.¹⁰

While it is true that the university harbors academics whose work often degenerates into an abstract and empty formalism, such a charge too easily slips into an overgeneralized critique that becomes self-serving, binaristic, and anti-intellectual. Refusing to interrogate the partiality of their own cultural authority, the proponents of the popular, everyday experience and anti-elitism "drown out" any semblance of difference and complexity under a notion of cultural sovereignty that is as problematic as it is arrogant. And yet, this argument has gained substantial currency in the last decade and is indicative of one dimension of the crisis that higher education is facing.¹¹

Higher Education as a Public Sphere

I want to enter this debate regarding critical education in unsettling times by arguing that the university is a major public sphere that influences massive numbers of people not only in terms of what is taught and how they might locate themselves in the context and content of specific knowledge forms but also in terms of the influence that the university has on large numbers of students who impact significantly on a variety of institutions in public life.¹² For example, if cultural critics were more attentive to what is taught in professions such as nursing, social work, and education, it might become more apparent what the importance and impact of such teaching is or might be on the thousands of teachers, health workers, and community people who battle in the health care system, social services, and the public schools. Surely, institutions such as the public schools, for instance, can be considered a major public sphere; yet there is hardly a word uttered by radical and conservative critics about the critical relationship between higher education and the public schools. Perhaps the more important question here is what silences have to endure in the debate on higher education in order for academic intellectuals to be dismissed as irrelevant even though much of the work that goes on in institutions of higher education directly affects thousands of students whose work is significantly related to public issues and the renewal of civil society.

If progressive cultural and educational workers are to resist the conservative assault on critical public spheres, they must be able to defend institutions of higher education as deeply moral and political spaces. They must define themselves not merely as intellectuals who are professional academics acting alone but as citizens whose collective knowledge and actions presuppose specific visions of public life, community, and moral accountability. Higher education must be defended through intellectual work that self-consciously recalls the tension between the democratic imperatives or possibilities of public institutions and their actual formation in everyday practice.

On one level, the practice of being a public intellectual suggests that academics develop their research programs, pedagogy, and conceptual frameworks in connection to cultural work undertaken in many arenas, including the media, labor organizations, and insurgent social movements. Such relationships should not be uncritical and suggest the necessity for public intellectuals to speak to issues from a number of public arenas to a diverse range of audiences. At the same time, such connections and alliances should not suggest that higher education define its public function simply through its association with other public spheres. First and foremost, it must be defended as a vital public sphere in its own right, one that has deeply moral and educative dimensions that directly affect civic life. This is an important issue, but the more relevant consideration at work in justifying the public nature of the university emerges out of the role higher education plays in educating students as critical agents who are equipped to understand, address, and expand the possibilities for deepening and sustaining democratic public life. As Andrew Ross points out, universities are not filled with students reduced to the passive institutional status of clients but with actual citizens who constitute a significant public as a group. "Millions of citizens populate the world of colleges and universities, and thereby constitute a public in its own right. In spite of the powerful, and overly prestigious influence of the private sector within higher education, internal conflicts can be easily defined as issues of public concern.^"13

Viewed as a critical public sphere, the university is defined as a site of contestation and potential instability marked by the democratic possibility for unpredictable collisions, diverse relations of representation, and what Mariam Hanson calls "multiple forms of community and solidarity."¹⁴ In opposition to this view, conservatives posit the university either as a replica of the modernist museum housing and displaying the privileged artifacts of a Western tradition or as an adjunct of the marketplace infused with the principles of commerce and competition. By abstracting higher education from a discourse of power, politics, and moral accountability, neoconservatives such as Roger Kimball, Lynne Cheney, Charles Sykes, William Bennett, Chester Finn Jr., and others have been able to argue forcefully against the university as a critical, public sphere actively engaged in addressing either the social problems of the larger society or broader global landscape. Lost in this discourse are the moral and political referents for accentuating the relationship between the university and the larger society through the imperatives of public service rather than the dynamics of professionalism, competi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors' Preface
• Part 1 State Educational Policy and Curriculum Reform in Unsettling Times
• Part 2 Education, Identity, and the Other
• Part 3 Reading Curriculum Texts
• Part 4 Pedagogy and Empowerment
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index