In his seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,1 Thomas Kuhn argued that even when our beliefs may be warranted and our methods sound, much of the time our knowledge and understanding is tethered to a dominant ideologyāor paradigmāthat may prevent us from drawing the right kinds of inferences from the data we have. And because most of us are uncritically socialized into one or more dominant ideologies, we usually fail to notice how they imperceptibly influence the subject matter we study, the questions we think it important to ask, and the theoretical frames we use to interpret our experience. Relatedly, we often fail to recognize how prone we are to discount evidence, and perhaps even competing evidentiary standards, that conflicts with our present knowledge and understanding. And while improved and more accurate understandings are certainly possible within a dominant ideology, new theoretical insights are improbable so long as accepted orthodoxies hold sway.
Many of our beliefs about education are like this. As such, an improved understanding concerning our current and future educational predicaments may require a critical analysis concerning what many of us have long taken for granted. This analysis, I submit, requires that we first identify what the underlying beliefs are, and why they may be problematic for what they fail to consider. The analysis further requires that we have the intellectual courage to question the veracity of some of our beliefs, given how prone to error all intellectual endeavors are. And finally, the analysis requires that we not refuse to consider pragmatic alternatives to our preferred strategies for fear of what our ideological adversaries might think. The demands of justice2 should not be circumscribed by partisan politics.
But identifying which of our beliefs is problematic is particularly difficult to do given that much of the time these lay hidden from view. As unexamined assumptions, they steer how we think, which questions we ask, which methods of inquiry we choose, which institutions we favor, and which policies we think it best to pursue. And in unwittingly falling back on these unexamined assumptions, what we are willing to entertain as a path forward risks being bounded by that which is comfortably familiar. And thus as it concerns many of our policies aimed at fostering greater educational justice, Becky Francis and Martin Mills have observed that many of our favored initiatives āare well-intentioned but must inevitably be undermined by the primacy of the model in which they are enacted.ā3
One way to extricate ourselves from this predicament is to reassert the value of critique, in particular critique of some of the most basic assumptions that motivate philosophers and empirical researchers but also policy-makers and practitioners, who care about educational justice. For by refusing to critically examine some of our own most cherished beliefs, we not only risk misconceiving the challenges we face; we may find that even our best attempts to remedy educational injustice are doomed to yield the same disappointing results.
But even if we are theoretically open to the value of critique, for many of us there is an almost predictably restive agitation that ensues: āCriticism is easyā we say; ābetter to focus on making things better than telling us what is wrong.ā āWe know what youāre against; now tell us what youāre forā is another common reply, as is āItās all well and good to stand back and criticize but what alternatives can you offer?ā And it is not unreasonable to prefer resolution to conflict, optimism to cynicism, or solutions to despair. I, too, am not enamored of the armchair critic who prefers to castigate the views of others while offering nothing in the way of constructive argument.
But neither do I take such a dim view of critique. Indeed critique serves a number of important, even constructive, epistemological functions. First, with its aim of offering a detailed analysis, critique can assist us in exposing, and in some cases even dislodging, bias. It is the very nature of bias that it inclines us to assume, think, and behave in ways about which we largely are unaware. Biases are notoriously difficult to detect owing to their largely unconscious influence on our thinking, attitudes, and behavior. They powerfully influence our ability to hear, let alone accept, ideas we find strange or unpleasant. Moreover, biases generally incline us to ignore, or downplay, contradictory evidence we do not want to consider, even when intellectual honesty should compel us to evaluate all the evidence.4
When biases harden into inflexible convictions about āthe way the world is,ā such that these convictions have the ring of unquestioned truth, we can even speak of dogma. Essentially an article of faith, dogma refers to those things we believe to be true, even when the preponderance of evidence points in the opposite direction, and even when those we aim to āhelpā tell us that our thinking is misguided. Hence to subscribe to a dogma is to espouse beliefs that are impervious to challenge. The outcome of years of socialization, much of it occurring directly via the school, dogmaāor what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as doxaāis the cumulative result of experience by which āthe natural and social world appears as self-evident.ā5 And when dogma influences a conceptual framework through which the world is viewed (echoing Kuhnās understanding of a paradigm), its influence, as we have just seen, determines both the questions it is permissible to pose and the conclusions it is tolerable to permit. Dogma thus assumes the appearance of established fact, something thought heretical to question, akin to a Catholic approaching the Eucharist only to impugn the efficacy of the sacrament.
Critique has a second function, which is to expose and unsettle the workings of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance (CD) refers to the unconscious habit of concurrently espousing contradictory beliefs, values, or understandings, where one belief, value, or understanding of an empirical reality must be downplayed so that another, more fundamental, belief, or value might prevail. To take an educational example, cognitive dissonance describes both the acknowledgement that the empirical facts concerning how school systems function are consistently and reliably true (say, with respect to how labelling, discipline, and tracking mechanisms disproportionately harm poor, minority pupils in āintegratedā schools6), and at the same time accommodate the belief that āintegratedā school environments will lead to fairer outcomes for these same pupils. In the struggle to reconcile oneās beliefs to the empirical realities, either the belief must be jettisoned, or the contradiction must be rationalized, for instance by reading all contradictory evidence in a way that reaffirms oneās preferred belief.7 Each of us is prone to do this at one time or another. But in the illustration above, it is the latter belief that must prevail for the majority of liberal educational scholars, even whenāas I discuss later in Chapter 58āthe bulk of the evidence generally points away from this belief.
Hence in the quest for educational justice, critique can be a valuable method in helping us to recognize, on the one hand, the inclination to downplay contradictory evidence, and on the other hand, in helping us better understand how bias prevents our knowledge and understanding from altering our beliefs and behaviors. Therefore I submit that in the absence of critique, cognitive dissonance may be preventing us from recognizing how an unconscious unwillingness to critically examine some of our most cherished beliefs can actually exacerbate educational injustice.
This brings me to a third important function of critique, which is that it can help us to get clear about the injustices that matter most, what their causes might be, but also what it is realistic to expect under conditions of persistent inequality. Though few are naĆÆve concerning the redoubtable challenges we face in seeking to mitigate educational injusticeāboth inside and outside of schoolsāmany liberal philosophers, researchers, and ordinary citizens exhibit a strange optimism9 concerning the ability of institutionalized education to compensate for these persistent inequalities. But Terry Eagleton has observed that optimists, ultimately
are conservatives because their faith in a benign future is rooted in their trust in the essential soundness of the present. Indeed, optimism is a typical component of ruling-class ideologiesā¦Bleakness, by contrast, can be a radical posture. Only if you view your situation as critical do you recognize the need to transform it. Dissatisfaction...