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02.Jan.2003 09:07 |
Critical Pedagogy and the Retreat of the Left
author: Peter MacLaren
 e-mail: mbatko@lycos.com
Practicing revolutionary pedagogy is different than propagating. Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a pre-revolutionary praxis that empowers students to reflect about a life outside the social omnipotence of capital and gain a presentiment of the possibilities of a future beyond the horizon of capitalism
Do we help capital out of crisis through our praxis or do we help students find their way out of capital? This article is translated from the German.
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Critical Pedagogy and the Retreat of the Left
Challenges for a Revolutionary Educational Theory
By Peter McLaren
[This article originally published in: Das Argument 246, 2002 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web,  http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=801.]
To be a radical educator in the US nowadays is decried as out of fashion. Defining one's politics as Marxist means attracting mockery and scorn from many sides including large parts of the left. Many critics abandon fundamental objections against capitalism and refuse questioning the aura of inevitability surrounding global capitalism.
The pedagogical left today is without a revolutionary programmatic and cannot oppose the consequences of the new capitalism. A progressive unchecked annexation of pedagogy in the capitalist production process occurs. Capitalism has been naturalized as everyday reality. According to Scott Davies and Neil Guppy (1997), one of the central guidelines of the neoliberal new order is forcing schools to adjust their policy and praxis to the towering significance of knowledge as a form of production. For neoliberal education theoreticians, schools have a far-reaching responsibility for economic development. A reformed educational system must make concessions to the post-industrial labor market and the newly forming global economy.
The economy receives a green light for restructuring the educational system. The model of homo economicus determines present educational policy. Transnational corporate conglomerates and their political feeders or marionettes urge reform. Globalization compels the school to correspond with the workplace and promote `flexible and lifelong learning'. In a knowledge-intensive economy, schools can no longer impart the skills and abilities for a lifelong occupational career. Education has become too important to be left to the teachers, it is said in unison. Governments intervene in a regulatory way so schools fulfill their function in countering economic stagnation and safeguarding global competitiveness.
Today capital is in a dominant position as never before. New transportation systems, sales markets and the increasing speed of capitalist trade promote its global and terrorist supremacy. The penetration of the logic of capital in everyday life and the elevation of the market to a sacred institution as a model for social relations successfully occurs. However the economic reconstruction includes both new dangers of capitalist inevitability and new possibilities for organizing against this dominance. One burning question persists in the debates on educational socialization and the new capitalist order: Can a renewed and revived critical pedagogy founded on an historical-materialist approach serve a progressive educational movement as a starting point for a policy of resistance and counter-hegemonial struggle in the nascent 21st century? On the surface, there is reason for optimism. The approach of critical pedagogy has become part of anti-racist and feminist struggles over all the years. The goal is building a democratic and social society based on the values of tolerance, recognition of difference and the claim of equal access to material resources for everyone. However such a role - as ennobling as it may be - has the consequence of different compromises and rejections toward earlier, more radical approaches, anti-imperialist struggles often connected with the anti-war movement of the sixties or identified with Latin America's revolutionar4y movements.
Critical Pedagogy and the Retreat of the Left
Critical pedagogy today no longer fulfills its former status. Rather critical pedagogy has lost its language of criticism and utopia that aimed at a radical democratization as in the late seventies and early eighties. If its advocates frequently made many enemies on account of their radical political orientation, a new generation has grown up today with a pluralistic approach in interpreting social antagonisms. Their work celebrates the `end of history' and seldom - if at all - brings criticism of global capitalism into the debate. These pedagogues see capitalism sometimes as malicious, sometimes as useful and sometimes as something that can possibly be tamed, like a wild horse, to serve humanity. Once regarded as an attack and insult by the followers and defenders of the `American dream', critical pedagogy today is psychologized, liberally humanized into something so technocratically and conceptually post-modern that its connection to social liberation struggles is either trifling or completely annulled. Critical pedagogy collapses in ethical arbitrariness and self-satisfied relativism. Its conceptual net was cast too broadly and too carelessly so everything fished out of the murky waters of pedagogical practices can be associated with this approach from classroom circles `friendly to each other' to the `feel good' curriculum build around the self-image of students.
Critical Pedagogy: Present Challenges
In the last 25 years, critical pedagogy stood in a turbulent relation to the dominant educational community both in North America and Great Britain. I will not discuss this history again in detail. Suffice it to say, an approach stressing the political character of pedagogical practices in the capitalist totality was carried out on the contradictory terrain of conflicting discourse and oppositional hegemonial cultural formations.
Critical pedagogy has always had an underground rapport with the working class, a relation that was lost with developments after 1989. In the early eighties, critical pedagogy was enlivened by the Marxist inspired works of the Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies and reconsideration of the works of John Dewey, Paulo Freire and the Frankfurter school. During this period, criticism was directed at the totality of social relations. My central point here is that modern debates over education reforms could be much richer if analyzed from the perspective of Marxist criticism... The quick-tempered deconstructivists help strengthen the academic hegemony of the ruling class.
The question about the possibilities of an historical-materialistic approach to critical pedagogy arises at a time when current critical pedagogy no longer serves as a platform for fundamental criticism of the upheaval of the grand division of labor and its effects on the social reproductive function of the school in the last capitalist society. The question whether critical pedagogy can be revived could hesitantly be answered positively notwithstanding the numerous problems facing the progressive tradition of critical education theory...
My understanding of the relation of capitalist socialization and institutional training is grounded in the Marxist theory of labor value... Education and occupational training form labor power and thus are decisive supports of class relations, in particular of the repressive relation of capital and labor in the center of capitalist society and its development. Insofar as academic education is based on living workers becoming commodities on which capitalism in its totality depends, academic education can also become the basis of social resistance. Since social labor power is produced in education processes and limits are set to this process, both the strength and tragedy peculiar to workers in capitalism are found in education. The tragedy results from the fact that labor has its grand counterpart in capital. In fact, education creates something in the form of human capital that penetrates its own soul. On the other side, teachers and trainers are bound in the social production of a unique commodity - the workforce - on which the whole capitalist system is based. This gives them special social power. They labor at the gate of one of the most vulnerable positions for capitalism. They can show visions of alternatives to capitalism in the classroom or at least promote criticism of dominant class relations and market injustice.
Teachers are in an exclusive position considering their ability to sabotage capitalism and put it in question. While teachers are helpful in the ideological reproduction of capitalism, they also represent a danger for capital and its social dominance, as Rikowski emphasizes. Educators are the guardians of the development of a commodity (labor power) that keeps capitalism alive while being in a structural position to stop the trouble-free flow of the manufacture of labor power by introducing principles antagonistic to capital rule. Such principles are social justice, equality and solidarity (Rikowski). On this way, education can be the foundation for a policy of social resistance against the capitalization of humanity and one of the forces developing forms of work not bound to commodification.
Action, Subjectivity and Resistance
Revolutionary critical pedagogy is based on an understanding of action that doesn't regard subjectivity as completely determined by capital. Furthermore, the contradictions within the social forces that constitute subjectivity expand the tears in the armor of capitalism. These contradictions create openings and opportunities for opposing capitalism. Our human ability, what Marx called our life spirit, and the social forms producing this ability combine in human forms of action that are expressions of contradictions in capitalist conditions. These contradictions also promote the openness of social existence and demonstrate the possibilities of collective abolition of contradictions in everyday life through revolutionary and far-reaching praxis. Critical subjectivity acts out of the practical bonds in social structures that empower without forcing human abilities. As a result, critical pedagogy promotes the variety and creativity proper to human conduct, the gaining of shared experiences and common interests, the disentangling of bonds joining social processes with individual experiences and the communication of hidden assumptions in everyday life.
Practicing revolutionary pedagogy is different than propagating. Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a pre-revolutionary praxis that empowers students to reflect about a life outside the social omnipotence of capital and gain a presentiment of the possibilities of a future extending beyond the horizon of capitalism (Allman 2001). How would such a world appear? What kind of work could and should be practiced in this world? A revolutionary critical pedagogy is joined to a future design that strives for the abolition of wage labor and the class society. Such a pedagogy cannot arise if it does not originate from our own praxis. As a result, this pedagogy is more praxis-oriented than theoretically pre-determinable. The principles proper to such a praxis which help form and guide the development of our `life spirit' in wrestling for social justice are discussed in detail by Paul Allman (2001). These include principles of mutual respect, openness, trust and cooperation, reading the world critically against the grain, readiness to initiate social changes, appropriating an `ethic of authenticity' as a guiding principle, living social justice as a passion, developing critical, creative and hopeful orientations, personal change by changing the social relation of teaching and learning, establishing democracy as a fundamental way of life, fostering critical curiosity and grounding solidarity, responsibility and change of oneself and society in the project of humanization.
Developing a critical pedagogy is vital that can help students to reconstruct the objective connections of the class struggle by analyzing the capitalist mode of production in its totality. We must do more than break with capital or attempt to escape capital logic. We must challenge its values. The key to resistance is developing a revolutionary critical pedagogy enabling the working class to discover how the practical value of their labor power is exploited by capital and how their own actions and power can oppose this form of rule and thus create a support of class relations arising out of the direct confrontation of capital in its varying social dimensions. Therefore critical pedagogy needs an understanding of the movement dialectic of capital and labor. The structure of the class struggle should be reconstructed in a way that makes possible the incorporation of education processes. Finally, the decisive question facing radical educators is raised here: Do we help capital out of crisis through our praxis or do we help students find their way out of capital?
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homepage: http://www.mbtranslations.com
address: mbatko@lycos.com
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This whole article could have been written in around a paragraph, and it wouldn't require the use of the words "pedagogical" or "programmatic" even once.