As I have been pointing out in the last several postings, there
are four basic philosophies of education.
To date, I have reviewed two conservative philosophies, perennialism and
essentialism, and one liberal one, progressivism. With this posting, I review the last of the
four, reconstructionism. I have already
dedicated quite a few entries to reviewing this philosophy. In that effort, I cast its ideas as an
antithesis to the prevailing mental construct that more or less governs the content
choices of our civics educators, the natural rights construct. In that account of reconstructionism, I
emphasized certain aspects. One, the
movement among leftist educators to promote reconstructionist ideas takes on,
to varying degrees, the arguments advanced by Karl Marx. Before one castigates this fact as
anti-American, I would point out that if one sees Social Security as a positive
government program, he or she also, to some degree, accepts Marxian ideas. As for the educators in question, there
exists a wide variance as to the degree any one of them considers him/herself a
Marxist – ranging from a committed to a lukewarm Marxist. Two, since there are varying degrees of
allegiance to the ideas of the “father” of communism, there is room for the
influence of several schools of thought that have been incorporated by various
reconstructionist educators including Freudianism, existentialism,
structural-functionalism, ideas of self-actualization advanced by Abraham
Maslow, humanist ideas and ideals of Carl Rogers, and others. In effect, the influences emanating from
these other sources soften the Marxian character of these reconstructionist ideas. Three, all reconstructionist educators are
committed to political action or praxis.
Addressing social needs, mostly those relating to economic deprivation
and discriminatory practices, calls on educators to engage in targeted
instruction; that is, instruction that leads to students taking on active roles
in reform efforts. And four, there is
the general belief that social needs take priority over individual needs.
With this fourth attribute, we see education changing its
emphasis from preparing students for the challenges of the adult world for
mostly private reasons to addressing those questions related to creating an
improved society. In the process, an
implicit goal is to promote worldwide democracy. These educators shift their attention from private
concerns such as imparting employable knowledge and skills to an education that
aims to reconstitute social relations that support a truer, in their view,
equality (closer to the standard of equality known as equal results[1]). The origins of this pedagogic approach
emanated from progressive education and began with the writings of John Dewey,
but the title of founder goes to Theodore Brameld.
Brameld, seemly affected by the brutality of World War II and
the effect the war had on the human psyche, set about to address the dangers left
to humankind by the technological advances brought about by war. The twin dangers of annihilation through
nuclear weapons and the level of cruelty and brutality experienced during the
war led him and others to see education as a way of advancing the use of
technology and human compassion to create a more humanistic society.
Two other educators who advanced reconstructionism were
George Counts and Paulo Freire. George
Counts saw education as the opportunity to encourage and prepare students to
engage in the establishment of a social order committed to social justice. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and
government official who, using his own experiences of living in poverty, set
out a general educational approach.
This blog reviewed Freire’s ideas as presented in his book, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.
In that review, I pointed out how he called on a cooperative relationship
between teacher and student where each played the roles of being teacher and
student. He argued that the oppressed
needed to divorce themselves from any desire to be an oppressor – those who
occupy the position of what is considered advantaged in an oppressive system – to
seek true liberation in which they understand the inherent dignity and
integrity of each individual.
Emphasizing dialogue between oppressed and oppressor, he argued for
developing awareness to combat domination.
He particularly saw as counterproductive the view of education as
“teaching as banking” in which a teacher strives toward “depositing”
information in the students’ heads – reminiscent of essentialism. Instead, Freire envisioned teaching and
learning as a reciprocal endeavor between those assigned as teacher and those
as students. Relying on the impetus of
students to use their experiences to denote what is to be studied, they engage
in inventing a new social reality – praxis.
Specific topics that these learning interactions entertain would be
reflective of the oppressed lives the students experience, such as hunger,
discrimination, lack of opportunity, violence, domestic abuse, drugs, divorce,
corruption, cronyism, and the like.
There is also associated with this approach a trend toward focusing on
both local, community conditions, and worldwide forces that affect local
conditions.
Collectively, this approach is also known as critical theory
or critical pedagogy. Its relation to
federation theory is that federalist thought shares a concern for inequality
with reconstructionist ideas. The basis
of this concern is different in its application. While critical theory promotes equal results
– a belief in a more equal distribution of income and wealth – federalists
believe in equal opportunity and regulated income and wealth distribution. Federalist theory holds that equal conditions
have definite problems with providing the incentives necessary to advance
economic initiatives. But federalists do
lend a supportive disposition toward the concern that not all of the entities
making up a society, as currently structured, are afforded equal standing in
the social realities of that society.
[1]
Equal results basically refer to an economic
arrangement in which variance in income and other compensations is roughly the
same for all participants in the economy.
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