Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture

Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era

Peter McLaren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134922284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is a principled, accessible and highly stimulating discussion of a politics of resistance for today. Ranging widely over issues of identity, representation, culture and schooling, it will be required reading for students of radical pedagogy, sociology and political science.

Part I
Pedagogy, culture, and the body

Chapter I
Radical pedagogy as cultural politics

Beyond the discourse of critique and anti-utopianism

With Henry A.Giroux

Within the last fifteen years a radical theory of education has emerged in the United States. Broadly defined as “the new sociology of education” or “a critical theory of education,” a critical pedagogy developed within this discourse attempts to examine schools both in their historical context and as part of the social and political relations that characterize the dominant society. While hardly constituting a unified discourse, critical pedagogy nevertheless has managed to pose an important counterlogic to the positivistic, ahistorical, de-politicized discourse that often informs modes of analysis employed by liberal and conservative critics of schooling, modes all too readily visible in most colleges of education. Taking as one of its fundamental concerns the need to re-emphasize the centrality of politics and power in understanding how schools function within the larger society, critical pedagogy has catalyzed a great deal of work on the political economy of schooling, the state and education, the politics of representation, discourse analysis, and the construction of student subjectivity.

The expurgatorious writings of critical pedagogy have provided a radical theory and analysis of schooling, annexing new discourses from various strands of critical social theory and developing at the same time new categories of inquiry and new methodologies. Critical pedagogy is not physically housed in any one school or university department, nor does it constitute a homogeneous set of ideas. Critical educational theorists are, however, united in their attempts to empower the powerless and to transform social inequalities and injustices. Constituting a small minority of the academic profession and of public schoolteachers, the movement nevertheless is substantial enough to present a challenging presence within the teaching profession.¹

One major task of critical peda.gogy has been to disclose and challenge the ideological privilege accorded the school in our political and cultural life. Especially within the last decade, educational theorists have come increasingly to view schooling as a resolutely political and cultural enterprise. Recent advances in the sociology of knowledge, the history of consciousness, the critical study of colonial discourse, cultural Marxism, continental social theory, and feminist theory have provoked a conceptual recasting of schools as more than simply instructional sites. They may instead be considered as cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discursive, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance. Within this context, schools have generally been analyzed as sort-ing mechanisms for human capital, in which groups of students are privileged on the basis of race, class and gender; and less frequently as agencies for self-and social empowerment.

This new perspective has ushered in a view of the school as a terrain of contestation. Groups from dominant and subordinate cultures negotiate on symbolic terms; students and teachers engage, accept, and sometimes resist the ways school experiences and practices are named and legitimated. The traditional view of classroom instruction—of learning as a neutral or transparent process antiseptically removed from the concepts of power, politics, history, and context—can no longer be credibly endorsed. In fact, researchers within the critical tradition have given primacy to the categories of the social, cultural, political, and economic, in order to better understand the workings of contemporary schooling.

Theorists within the critical tradition examine schooling as a form of cultural politics. From this perspective, schooling always represents forms of social life and is always implicated in relations of power, social practices, and the privileging of forms of knowledge that support a specific vision of past, present, and future. In general, critical educational theorists maintain that the cultural politics of the schools historically and currently inculcate a meritocratic, professional ideology, rationalizing the knowledge industry into class-divided tiers; reproduce inequality, racism, and sexism; and fragment democratic social relations through an emphasis on competitiveness, androcentrism, logocentrism, and cultural ethnocentrism.

While remaining indebted to specialized frameworks appropriated from European intellectual traditions, critical pedagogy also draws upon a uniquely American tradition. That tradition extends from the mainstream progressive movement of John Dewey, William H.Kilpatrick, and others, to the more radical efforts of the social reconstructionists of the 1920s, such as George Counts and John Childs, to the work of Theodore Brameld, and finally to the more current theoretical contributions of revisionist educators.²

Fundamental to the principles that inform critical pedagogy is the conviction that schooling for self-and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology or to a mastery of technical or social skills that are primarily tied to the logic of the marketplace. Concern over education’s atrophied ethical dimension has provoked leftist scholars to undertake a socially critical reconstruction of what it means to “be schooled.” Their efforts stress that any genuine pedagogical practice demands a commitment to social transformation in solidarity with subordinated and marginalized groups. In its broadest possible sense, this entails a preferential option for the poor and the elimination of conditions which promote human suffering. Such theorists are critical of liberal democracy’s emphasis on individualism and autonomy, questioning the assumption that individuals are ontologically independent or that they are the autonomous, rational, and self-motivating social agents that liberal humanism has constructed. The theoretically and historically unsituated analyses of schooling promulgated by liberal and conservative critics alike represent different ideological aspects of the dominant society; each perspective privileges the interests of the dominant culture with equal facility. The liberal perspective especially has been shown to be reappropriated by the very logic it purports to criticize. By contrast, the radical perspective involves a critical reinscription of liberalism in a concerted attempt to displace its Eurocentric, patriarchal, and logocentric assumptions. Employing theoretical strategies that allow the unstated and submerged grammar of schooling to be more insistently critiqued and transformed, radical educators work to reveal the social and material conditions of schooling’s production and reception.

Challenging the dominant assumption that schools currently function as a major mechanism for the development of the democratic and egalitarian social order, radical educational theorists have argued that schools do not provide opportunities for self-and social empowerment. They have also challenged the dominant assumption that schools currently constitute major sites of social and economic mobility, arguing instead that American schooling has defaulted on its promise of egalitarian reform. In this view, the economic, social, and political returns from schooling are far greater for the economically affluent than for the disadvantaged. Curriculum becomes both a “selective tradition” and a duplicitous practice that provides students with particular forms of knowledge, ideologically coded in ways similar to the goods and services that have been subjected to the logic of commodification.³

In their efforts to explode the popular belief that schools are fundamentally democratic institutions, radical critics have attempted to demon-strate how curricula, knowledge, and policy depend on the corporate marketplace and the fortunes of the economy. They warn against being deluded into thinking that either conservatives or liberals occupy a truly progressive platform from which educational decisions can be made on the basis of transparent and disinterested standards. Furthermore, their critique has revealed that the application of rigorous standards is never innocent of social, economic, and institutional contexts. In this view, schooling must always be analyzed as a cultural and historical process in which select groups are positioned within asymmetrical relations of power. Radical scholars refuse to accept the task capitalism assigns them as intellectuals, teachers, and social theorists: to service the existing ideological and institutional arrangements of the public schools, while simultaneously discounting the values and abilities of minority groups. In short, educators within the critical tradition regard mainstream schooling as supporting the transmission and reproduction of what Paulo Freire terms “the culture of silence.”

Central in their attempt to reform public education has been a critical rejection of the worst aspects of the modern Enlightenment project, defined in terms of a debilitating positivism, instrumental reason, and bureaucratic control, which have been tacitly lodged in models of curriculum planning and dominant approaches to educational theory and practice. Bolstered by certain strands of feminist theory and postmodernist social theory, critical pedagogy continues to challenge the often uncontested relationship between school and society, effectively unmasking mainstream pedagogy’s development as a purveyor of equal opportunity and its claim to access such virtues as egalitarian democracy and critical inquiry. Rejecting the conservative claim that schooling is a politically opaque and value-neutral process, critical pedagogy has attempted to empower teachers and researchers with more critical means of understanding the school’s role within a race-, class-, and gender-divided society. Radical pedagogy has generated categories crucial for interrogating the production of student experiences, texts, teacher ideologies, and aspects of school policy that conservative and liberal analyses too often leave untouched. In effect, critical pedagogy has sharply etched the political dimensions of schooling, arguing that schools operate mainly to reproduce the discourses, values, and privileges of existing elites.

Critical pedagogy commits itself to forms of learning and action that are undertaken in solidarity with subordinated and marginalized groups. In addition to interrogating what is taken for granted or seemingly self-evident or inevitable regarding the relationship between schools and the social order, critical pedagogy is dedicated to self-empowerment and social transformation.

At the same time, many current trends in critical pedagogy are embedded in the endemic weaknesses of a theoretical project overly concerned with developing a language of critique. Critical pedagogy is steeped in a posture of moral indignation toward the injustices reproduced in American public schools. Unfortunately, this one-sided emphasis on critique is matched by the lack of ethical and pragmatic discourse upon which to ground its own vision of society and schooling and to shape the direction of a critical praxis.

How does one redefine the purpose of public schooling and rethink the role of teaching and learning in emancipatory terms? More orthodox radical educational theorists have been unable to move from a posture of criticism to one of substantive vision, from a language of critique to a language of possibility. Drawing inspiration from the traditional perspectives of Marxism and socialism, of liberalism and democratic theory, critical educators have constructed a powerful critique of the culture and knowledge industries; yet they have been unable to conceive of pedagogical and curricular reform outside of the most debilitating metaphysical assumptions of the Enlightenment. At the same time they have failed to achieve the most ennobling goals of modernity, which are to link reason to values and ethical reflection to the project of individual emancipation and social justice. These critics have been unable either to adequately mobilize key public constituencies or to challenge the current conservative attack on the schools (Giroux and McLaren 1994a) and the philistinism of the federal bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Education. This theoretical and political impasse appears to mark a fin-de-siècle frus-tration with political economy models of educational reform and a failure of liberal progressivism. To a great extent their work remains fettered by a mode of analysis that hovers over, rather than directly engages, the contradictions of the social order that their efforts seek to transform.

Generally speaking, critical educators have been unable to develop a critical discourse that provides the theoretical basis for alternative approaches to school organization, curricula, classroom pedagogy, and social relations (Giroux and McLaren 1987). Nor have attempts been made to redefine the individual social actor—whether teacher or student —as constituting multiply organized subjectivities that are both gendered and discursively embedded in complex and contradictory ways. The programmatic impetus of much radical educational reform remains fettered by the limited emancipatory goal of making the everyday problematic. But while calling into question the ideological dimensions of classroom transactions—i.e., the structural positioning of thought in relation to the larger social totality—is certainly commendable as a starting point, it cannot further the project of democratizing our classrooms unless united with the larger goal of reconstituting schools as counterpublic spheres (Giroux and McLaren 1986a). The language of critique that informs much radical theorizing is overly individualistic, Eurocentric, androcentric, and reproductive; radical educators fail to acknowledge that the struggle for democracy, in the larger sense of transforming schools into democratic public spheres, takes political and ethical precedence over making teachers more adept at deconstructive “double readings.” That is, this language’s programmatic suggestions are locked into the limited posture of reproduction and resistance theories (Giroux and McLaren 1986b). In general, critical pedagogy can be accused of purveying either a mechanical and deterministic view of the social order or a liberal, humanist, and Cartesian view of human agency. Its emphasis on individual student subjectivity constructed within particular discursive alignments and power/knowledge configurations has deflected attention from the concept of collective struggle. While we recognize, along with feminist theorists and others, that we must challenge the claims of a unitary female experience and universal experiences based on race or class, we remain optimistic that critical pedagogy will be able to address these issues while at the same time discovering new ways of establishing itself as a collective countervailing force with the power to inscribe a condition of radical possibility, what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as the construction of a “radical imaginary” (1985:190).

CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AS A FORM OF CULTURAL POLITICS

Despite the advances of critical pedagogy over the last decade, there remains the problem of how cultural politics is to be defined and developed. The problem results from the one-sidedness of the critical tradition’s analysis. Critical pedagogy has failed to articulate a vision for self-empowerment and social transformation; consequently, the term “critical pedagogy” needs to have its meaning specified in more precise terms.

“Pedagogy” refers to the process by which teachers and students negotiate and produce meaning. This, in turn, takes into consideration how teachers and students are positioned within discursive practices and power/knowledge relations. “Pedagogy” also refers to how we represent ourselves, others, and the communities in which we choose to live. The term “critical pedagogy,” by distinction, underscores the partisan nature of learning and struggle; it provides a starting point for linking knowledge to power and a commitment to developing forms of community life that take seriously the struggle for democracy and social justice. Critical pedagogy always presupposes a particular vision of society. As Roger Simon reminds us, a critical pedagogy is based on a project of empowerment. Without a vision of the future—without asking, “Empowerment for what?” —critical pedagogy becomes reduced to a method for participation that takes democracy as an end, not a means. In Simon’s terms, critical pedagogy must be distinguished from teaching:

To me “pedagogy” is a more complex and extensive term than “teaching,” referring to the integration in practice of particular curriculum content and design, classroom strategies and techniques, and evaluation, purpose, and methods. All of these aspects of educational practice come together in the realities of what happens in classrooms. Together they organize a view of how a teacher’s work within an institutional context specifies a particular version of what knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. In other words, talk about pedagogy is simultaneously talk about the details of what students and others might do together and the cultural politics such practices support. In this perspective, we cannot talk about teaching practice without talking about politics.

(Simon 1987:30)

Unfortunately, the New Right has naturalized the term “critical” by repeated and imprecise usage, removing its political and cultural dimensions and its analytic potency, leaving only the sense of “thinking skills.” Teaching is thus reduced to “transmitting” basic skills and information and sanctifying the canons of the dominant cultural tradition. The moral vision that grounds such a view encourages students to succeed in the world of existing social forms. Critical pedagogy, as we are using the term, refers to a form of cultural politics aimed at enhancing and transforming the social imagination. Our task here is to outline what such a conceptualization might mean for education.

Critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics attempts to redress the ideological shortcomings of current analyses of schooling and mainstream discussions of pedagogy, particularly as found in teacher education programs. For instance, student teachers are often introduced to a one-dimensional conception of schooling. Student teachers often encounter schooling as a set of rules and regulative practices that have been laundered of ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, and resistance. Schools are presented as free of all ideological contestation and struggle. Educators usually think of struggle in schools as “behavioral struggle”—attempts to delegitimate certain forms of unruly behavior—a perception enforced by myths of the “culture of poverty” or the naturalness of cultural or racial “deficiencies,” which we read as a perception of students’ “lack of whiteness” on the part of many teachers from the dominant white culture.

Classroom reality is rarely presented as socially constructed, historically determined, and mediated through institutionalized relationships of class, gender, race, and power. This dominant conception of schooling vastly contradicts the economies of power, privilege, and subject-formation in which student teachers are actually located during the practicum, especiall...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: PEDAGOGY, CULTURE, AND THE BODY
• PART II: CRITICAL AGENCY, BORDER NARRATIVES, AND RESISTANCE MULTICULTURALISM
• PART III: POSTCOLONIAL PEDAGOGIES AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES