Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education

From Piaget to the Present

Liora Bresler, David Cooper, Joy Palmer, Liora Bresler, David Cooper, Joy Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134592586
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education looks at fifty of the twentieth century's most significant contributors to the debate on education. Among those included are:
* Pierre Bourdieu
* Elliot Eisner
* Hans J. Eysenck
* Michel Focault
* Henry Giroux
* Jurgen Habermas
* Susan Isaacs
* A.S. Neill
* Herbert Read
* Simone Weill.
Together with Fifty Major Thinkers on Education
this book provides a unique history of educational thinking. Each essay gives key biographical information, an outline of the individual's principal achievements and activities, an assessment of his or her impact and influence and a list of their major writings and suggested further reading.

JÜRGEN HABERMAS 1929–

The commitment to consider all individuals as potential participants in discourse presupposes a universalistic commitment to the potential equality, autonomy, and rationality of individuals.¹

Jürgen Habermas is the leading second generation figure of the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers, social theorists and cultural critics who established the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1929. Habermas taught philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, before moving to the Max Planck Institute in 1972, and subsequently, from the mid 1980s, returning to his post as professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt.

Though a social theorist and philosopher rather than an educationist, Habermas has exerted a profound influence on education. His early work takes forward the project of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (e.g. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) in its critique of instrumental reason and positivism as being ‘scientistic’ (the belief that all worthwhile knowledge is only scientific knowledge (Habermas 1972, p.4) and ‘technicist’ (e.g. treating people and situations as means to an end), and in its expressed political intention of emancipating disempowered individuals and groups within an egalitarian society. Habermas’ early work is an attempt to base a social theory on epistemology, and is explicitly prescriptive and normative, entailing a view of what behaviour in a social democracy should entail. Its intention is not simply to provide an account of society and behaviour but to realise a society that is based on equality and democracy for all its members. The purpose of his theory is not merely to understand situations, powe rand phenomena but to change them, to eradicate inequality.

Habermas, like his former mentorand teacher Adorno, finds differential, illegitimate powe rand inequality to be structurally inherent in capitalism. Capitalism maintains its hegemony (where ideology and unequal power relations operate with the tacit consent of all participants, even the disempowered, contributing to their acceptance of their disempowe red positions) by averting crises of motivation, legitimacy, identity, politics and economics.² Habermas’ early work is located in the tradition of ideology critique of the Frankfurt School and is premised on fundamental principles of social justice, the promotion of social equality, the creation and nurture of ‘generalizable interests’, and the commitment to the achievement of democratic society. Habermas defines his notion of ideology as the ‘suppression of generalizable interests’³ in the day-to-day lives of participants, where systems or groups possessing poweroperate in rationally indefensible ways because their power relies on the disempowering of other groups, i.e. their principles of behaviour are not universalizable. Ideology critique, in some part, is a critique of the illegitimate operation of powerand hegemony in capitalist society.

Habermas’ critical theory suggests an educational agenda, and also has its own methodologies, in particular ideology critique and action research. Ideology – the values, beliefs and practices emanating from particular dominant groups – is the means by which powerful groups promote and legitimate their particular – sectoral – interests at the expense of disempowered groups. Ideology critique is designed to expose the operation of ideology in many spheres of society and education and the working out of vested interests under the mantle of the general good, which may be occurring consciously or subliminally, revealing to participants how they may be acting to perpetuate a system which keeps them either empowe red or dis-empowered, i.e. which suppresses a generalizable interest. Situations are not natural but are the outcomes or processes wherein interests and powers are protected and suppressed, and one task of ideology critique is to expose this.

Habermas⁴ suggests that ideology critique can be addressed in four stages:

Stage one: a description and interpretation of the existing situation – a hermeneutic exercise that identifies and attempts to make sense of the current situation (echoing, from Weber, the verstehen approaches of the interpretive paradigm).

Stage two: a penetration of the reasons that brought the existing situation to the form that it takes – the causes and purposes of a situation and an evaluation of their legitimacy, involving an analysis of interests and ideologies at work in a situation, their powerand legitimacy (both in micro- and macro-sociological terms). In Habermas’ early work he likens this to psychoanalysis as a means for bringing into consciousness of ‘patients’ those repressed, distorted and oppressive conditions, experiences and factors that have prevented them from a full, complete and accurate understanding of their conditions, situations and behaviour, and that, on such exposure and examination, will become liberatory and emancipatory. Critique here serves toreveal to individuals and groups how their views and practices might be ideological distortions that, in their effects, are perpetuating a social order or situation that works against their democratic freedoms, interests and empowerment.⁵

Stage three: the setting of an agenda for altering the situation – in order fo moves to be made towards an egalitarian society.

Stage four: an evaluation of the achievement of the new, egalitarian situation in practice.

Ideology is not mere theory but impacts directly on practice. The educational methodology suggested by critical theory is action research.⁶ Action research accords power to those who are operating in educational contexts, for they are both the engines of research and of practice. In that sense the claim is made that action research is strongly empowering and emancipatory. It gives practitioners a ‘voice’,⁷ participation in decision making, and control over their environment and professional lives. Whether the strength of the claims for empowe rment through action research are as strong as their proponents would hold is another matter, for action research for change and control might be relatively powerless in the face of mandated changes in education.

Habermas’ theory of knowledge-constitutive interests seeks to uncover the interests at work in particular situations and to interrogate the legitimacy of those interests,⁸ identifying the extent to which they serve equality and democracy. The intention of his theory is transformative: to transform society and individuals to social democracy. In this respect the purpose of critical educational research is intensely practical – to bring about a more just, egalitarian society in which individual and collective freedoms are practised, and to eradicate the exercise and effects of illegitimate power. For critical theorists and critical educationists, teachers and researchers can no longer claim neutrality and ideological or political innocence.

Habermas suggests that knowledge serves different interests and that social analysis can be conducted in terms of the knowledge-constitutive interests operating in society. Interests, he argues, are socially constructed, and are ‘knowledge-constitutive’, because they shape and determine what counts as the objects and types of knowledge. Interests have an ideological function,⁹ for example a ‘technical interest’ can have the effect of keeping the empowered in their empowe red position and the disempowered in their powerlessness, i.e. reinforcing and perpetuating the societal status quo. An ‘emancipatory interest’ threatens the status quo. In this view knowledge is not neutral. What counts as worthwhile educational knowledge is determined by the social and positional power of the advocates of that knowledge, i.e. communities of scholars. Knowledge and definitions of knowledge reflect the interests of the community of scholars who operate in particular paradigms (e.g. Kuhn 1962).

Habermas¹⁰ constructs the definition of worthwhile knowledge and modes of understanding around three cognitive interests: (1) prediction and control; (2) understanding and interpretation; (3) emancipation and freedom. He names these the technical, practical and emancipatory interests respectively. The technical interest characterizes the scientific, positivist method, with its emphasis on laws, rules, prediction and control of behaviour, with passive research objects, and instrumental knowledge. The practical interest is exemplified in the hermeneutic, interpretive methodologies outlined in qualitative approaches to understanding and researching education (e.g. symbolic interactionism). Here research methodologies seek to clarify, understand and interpret the communications of ‘speaking and acting subjects’.¹¹ Hermeneutics focuses on interaction and language; it seeks to understand situations through the eyes of the participants, echoing Weber’s principle of verstehen. It is premised on the view that reality is socially constructed. Indeed Habermas¹² suggests that sociology must understand social facts in their cultural locations and as being socially determined. Hermeneutics involves revealing the meanings of interacting subjects, recovering and reconstructing the intentions of actors in a situation. Such an enterprise involves the analysis of meaning in a social context. Meanings rather than phenomena take on significance here.

The emancipatory interest subsumes the previous two interests; it requires them but goes beyond them.¹³ It is concerned with praxis: action that is informed by reflection with the aim to emancipate. The twin intentions of this interest are to expose the operation of powerand to bring about social justice, arguing that domination and repression prevent the full existential realization of individual and social freedoms.¹⁴ The task of this knowledge-constitutive interest, indeed of critical theory itself, is torestore to consciousness those suppressed, repressed and submerged determinants of unfree behaviour with a view to their dissolution.¹⁵

Habermas’ work impacts on education very considerably, covering, for example, curriculum design, aims, content, pedagogy, evaluation and research. At the le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Routledge Key Guides
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Alphabetical list of contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• A.S. Neill, 1883–1973
• Susan Isaacs, 1885–1948
• Harold Rugg, 1886–1960
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1889–1951
• Martin Heidegger, 1889–1976
• Herbert Edward Read, 1893–1968
• Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, 1896–1934
• Jean Piaget, 1896–1980
• Michael Oakeshott, 1901–92
• Carl Rogers, 1902–87
• Ralph Winifred Tyler, 1902–94
• Burrhus Frederic Skinner, 1904–90
• Harry Broudy, 1905–98
• Simone Weil, 1909–43
• Joseph J. Schwab, 1910–88
• Clark Kerr, 1911–
• Benjamin S. Bloom, 1913–99
• Jerome S. Bruner, 1915–
• Torsten Husén, 1916–
• Lee J. Cronbach, 1916–
• Donald Thomas Campbell, 1916–96
• Maxine Greene, 1917–
• R.S. Peters, 1919–
• John I. Goodlad, 1920–
• Paulo Freire, 1921–97
• Seymour B. Sarason, 1919–
• Israel Scheffler, 1923–
• Jean-François Lyotard, 1924–98
• Lawrence A. Cremin, 1925–90
• Basil Bernstein F., 1925–2000
• Michel Foucault, 1926–84
• Margaret Donaldson, 1926–
• Ivan Illich, 1926–
• Lawrence Kohlberg, 1927–87
• Paul H. Hirst, 1927–
• Philip Wesley Jackson, 1928–
• Jane Roland Martin, 1929–
• Nel Noddings, 1929–
• Jürgen Habermas, 1929–
• Carl Bereiter, 1930–
• Pierre Bourdieu, 1930–
• Neil Postman, 1931–
• Theodore R. Sizer, 1932–
• Elliot Eisner, 1933–
• John White, 1934–
• Lee S. Shulman, 1938–
• Michael W. Apple, 1942–
• Howard Gardner, 1943–
• Henry Giroux, 1943–
• Linda Darling-Hammond 1951–