JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, VII

 

[Note:  This posting is subject to further editing.]

 

An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation …

To remind readers, this blog is reviewing the theoretical elements of critical theory as the most popular antithesis to the prevailing view of governance and politics, the natural rights view.  As it stands today, the view that most influences what is taught in civics classrooms is the natural rights construct.  To this date this blog has reported on natural rights and has critiqued it. 

Now it is doing the same for critical theory and its educational version, critical pedagogy.  Early into this review, this blogger warned readers that he would utilize William H. Schubert’s commonplaces of curriculum[1] (subject matter, teacher, learners, and milieu) but not in an ordered fashion.  Why?  Because critical pedagogy is not well established within the nation’s schools.  Of recent date, there seems to be some influence being exerted among textbook publishers, but not extensively.

But here are some added concerns this review will continue to address:   Beginning with subject matter, presentations will focus in on the morality of critical theory, the discipline of the social sciences as they relate to critical theory, and the interdisciplinary nature of critical theory.

With the category, the “student,” this review will sustain the subcategories used with natural rights, personal student interests, student social interests, students’ economic interests, political student interests, and pedagogic student interests.  For “teacher,” it will revolve around two subcategories:  teacher effectiveness and teacher knowledge.  Finally, the “milieu” will direct attention to the expectations of schools, schools’ socioeconomic base, and youth culture.[2]  But again, what will follow will not follow the sequence indicated by these listings.

          So, how is critical theory interpreted by those pedagogues who are sympathetic to its claims and arguments.  With an overall contextual claim, that critical theory is the main challenge to the natural rights view – it being mostly advanced by academics – one can place this view outside mainstream thinking among educators and the general public.  As stated earlier, where this view does have significant support is on the campuses of the nation’s universities and colleges.

          While support is not a hundred percent, if one reviews scholarly journals in related fields, one finds their content heavily skewed to critical theory studies and other related topics.  In addition, they have attained editorial control over what will even be considered for publication.  This blogger has checked out various publications and from his personal experience when was a member of academia, he encountered this trend firsthand.

Here is an example from the current issue of Theory and Research in Social Education,[3] its third article, “Theorizing Necropolitics in Social Studies Education.”  And to give readers a flavor, here’s is a description of “necropolitics”:

 

In other words, necropolitics is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life.  The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth.  In the United States, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender, wealthy, Christian man, this is great news for you.  But the further away you are from axes of privilege, the less your life is worth under the logics of necropolitics – and the more precarious your existence becomes.[4]

 

Surely citing this article is not enough evidence to prove the point, but let this blogger state again, from his experience this dominance of critical pedagogy is real.

          So, what then are the curricular views of critical pedagogy?  And in truth, this is a moving target in that those who claim to be critical pedagogues, like critical theorists, do represent a wide array of opinions and theoretical beliefs.  The effort here will be to identify those beliefs and values that all of them share.

          All of them, while they do introduce sociological and psychological ideas and concerns, share political views in terms of action or praxis.  They favor a curricular approach that highlights student actions that are aimed at advancing justice as they define it.  And their view establishes justice as an expression, to some meaningful degree, of equality as a prevailing societal condition. 

To be clear, equality serves as their trump value.  And in their work, they estimate, for example, useful, efficient, and targeted efforts to advance equality that have proven to be effective.  In addition, they do not necessarily plead for a democratic-socialist state but do favor socialist style programs.

          More specifically, they pass judgment on programs with a forward looking bent – how do existing efforts affect society, especially the economy, in how evenly income and wealth are distributed or how are disadvantaged affected by implemented policies?  This blogger believes that for the majority of them, an eventual democratic-socialist state would be preferrable.

          In the meantime, they focus on the role schools should play in this ongoing drama.  In terms of civics, a direct appeal on encouraging social activism is not considered beyond any bounds.  Part of good citizenship, under this view, should include social activism that is targeted to secure true equality. 

Further, to administer such a curriculum, didactic methods will not do.  Instead, teachers lead (and are led by) students in engaging in rational discourse, reflection on experiences, and, probably most importantly, having them participate in appropriate educational action that seek to promote social justice – that being praxis. 

In this more interactive mode of instruction a cycle is organized.  Study leads to praxis and praxis leads to study.  Action is evaluated and further researched and through that reflection leads to more action.  And ultimately, students should gain the motivation and knowledge to be proactive.  That would be in what course they deem worthy of their efforts but with a definite and informed position concerning the alleged levels of subjugation critical pedagogues claim are plaguing society.

Any curricular approach, in a democracy, should do the same thing, i.e., reflect some organizing view of the subject matter.  What varies are the substantive positions a curriculum highlights, which questions it asks, and what information it highlights.  Therefore, as with any curricular strategy, some view of society, governance, and politics will guide what is taught and how it is taught.  So, critical pedagogues need not be defensive that they too strive to guide what constitutes civics education.

How does all this happen?  Here’s an example:  the teaching of energy.  The guiding view will highly influence how this topic is presented to students.  Will the approach harp on short-term or long-term concerns.  Will it emphasize market mechanisms, its pricing effects, its demand levels, supply levels, etc.?  Or will it emphasize the effects that energy sources have on society?  The harm carbon-based energy has on living creatures or the effects it has on climate.  Or all of these?  The answer lies in the mental construct one brings to the topic.

Natural rights would probably be more concerned with the markets short term mechanisms in which participants are geared to secure maximum profits over the short term yet dismiss or neglect external costs (costs that elude responsible agents – which is what usually happens in cases of pollution) or the long-term effects of current practices – e.g., what will happen to the environment?

Critical pedagogues are apt to ask the following questions to initiate critical analysis:

 

•                How is knowledge reproduced by schools?

•                What are the sources of knowledge that students utilize in schools?

•      How do students and teachers resist or contest what is conveyed through their life experiences in schools?

•                What do students and teachers realize from their school experiences? In other words, what impact does school have on their outlooks?

•                Whose interests are served by the outlooks and the skills fostered by schooling?

•                When served, do these interests move more in the direction of emancipation, equity, and social justice, or do they move in the opposite direction?

 

 

And by the “opposite direction” one is referring to the interests of the oppressors.

Educators, according to this construct and in line with the above questions, should ask themselves:  how can students be empowered to attain greater liberation, equity, and social justice through schooling?[5] Such a perspective assumes that the status quo falls short and even promotes exploitation.  The next posting will pick up on this concern.

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[1] William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).  The commonplaces can be defined as follows:

·       The subject matter refers to the academic content presented in the curriculum. 

·       The teacher is the professional instructor authorized to present and supervise curricular activities within the classroom setting. 

·       Learners are defined as those individuals attending school for the purpose of acquiring the education entailed with a particular curriculum.

·       Milieu refers to the general cultural setting and ambiance within the varied social settings found at the school site. 

[2] Those are the areas of interests which the blog will further analyze by implementing Aristotle’s categories of causation.  That is, concerns that are derived from the values and beliefs to which critical theory ascribes, i.e., they will inquire into the state of affairs, interactions, situational insights, and the capacity to act morally.  To be more specific, here are these categories described:  The state of affairs refers to the actual conditions found in schools, as opposed to abstracted or hypothesized relations between factors or variables.  Of particular concern will be dilemmas caused by adherence to critical theory as opposed to another construct.  Interactions refer to social encounters affected by the respective constructs.  Situational insights are interpretations of encounters gleaned from analyses of practice.  Capacity to act morally will be assessments of practices judged according to good citizenship and social capital.  This is highly dependent on cultural dispositions within a given moral outlook.

[3] Theory & Research in Social Education, 51, 1 (2023).

[4] Namata Verghese, “What Is Necropolitics?  The Political Calculation of Life and Death,” Teen Vogue (March 10, 2021, accessed April 5, 2023, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-necropolitics.

[5] Ibid.

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, VI

 

[Note:  This posting is subject to further editing.]

 

An advocate of critical theory continues his/her presentation[1] …

After reviewing this blog’s postings of late, this blogger has decided to insert a short posting that might clarify previously shared information.  In an attempt to further shed light on what critical theory considers discourses the following is offered.  To help in this effort, this posting looks back to the time frame previous postings have cited and utilizes an article from 1995 which was published in Theory and Research in Social Education.[2]

          Its authors, Valerie Pang, Geneva Gay, and William B. Stanley, share with their readers examples of language usage that actually affect non-advantaged people.  They describe and explain how this takes place as unjust policies are developed and implemented with the aim of maintaining subjugating relationships with those who are disadvantaged or oppressed. 

Specifically, they offer a list of ways critical theorists have identified in how these subjugating uses of language oppress the disadvantaged:

 

1.     The discourses provide the reasoning and rationale for restrictive community formation.  Here the advantaged groups implement exclusionary policies so as to insure “those people” don’t live nearby.  Grounds for such exclusion have been based on ethnic, racial, social, and/or cultural grounds.  One need only observe the ever-increasing number of gated communities to illustrate how prevalent this strategy is.

2.     Lack of any motivation – mostly from unawareness – by the privileged groups in understanding or even knowing how relatively better off they, the dominant group, lives.  That group is mostly populated by Anglo men, and, to a lesser degree, Anglo women who are cognitively or emotionally blind to the systematic disadvantages that the oppressed are forced to sustain.

3.     The advantaged groups – what some in the critical theory camp call the oppressors – opt to speak in terms of myths.  One such myth is the “bootstrap” myth which maintains that anyone can secure suitable income levels if that person puts in the sufficient amount of effort and hard work.  In turn, such views count on significant levels of individualism.  It ignores how important community supports function in bolstering any chances of success one might have.  This includes appropriate encouragement, assets, exemplary cases of success to emulate, etc.

This sort of targeted perception gives rise to views of reality that are skewed toward messaging of these myths.  And this whole biased view is further enhanced with oversimplified beliefs one attains from reductionist studies of reality.  For example, what meaning does the term “American Dream” suggest? 

Does that meaning even touch the complex world one encounters – often fights – in attempting to advance one’s interests or in lodging demands when one either has or does not have the necessary resources for success.  Are success stories more a product of good fortune than planned out strategies?  Detailed accounts of success stories, to this blogger, seem to be riddled with lucky turns.

4.     It is often the case with these rationalizations, i.e., those found in the discourses of the advantaged, that psychologically predisposes members of that group to be unable to acknowledge their own levels of prejudicial thinking and acting.  That is, they are disposed to see any economic misfortunes befalling the oppressed as being due to non-factors such as the prevalence of a culture of poverty.

A prime strategy that such thinking employs to justify resultant policies is to destroy the cultures of the oppressed people and encourage other policies aimed to assimilate them to mainstream norms and ethos. These sought after social states are further glorified with mythological language.

5.     Further use of language by the advantaged is noted for supporting such practices as segregating the disadvantaged from liberating opportunities.  For example, one sees encouraging minority students, in ordinate numbers, to take up vocational courses or programs even when individual students demonstrate talent and intelligence in their academic efforts. 

In addition, with reductionist thinking, advantaged policy makers are continuously seeking “magic bullet” solutions to educational challenges – e.g., whole language vs. the phoenix explosion – which experience has shown to accrue little in the way of payoffs.  The problems of public schools are complex and demand nuanced study and policies.  Instead, the dominant language based on reductionist, positivist studies do little to improve their efforts at addressing the challenges posed by the conditions of the disadvantaged.

 

And finally, let this posting add one more word on what the term, discourse, means.  It is language used by the advantaged which has become politized.  That is, as the privileged not only strive to maintain their relative advantages, they also have to be cognizant of what arrangements, social, political, economic, allow for these advantages to remain secure.  In such efforts, they need to devise and implement strategies that in effect rationalize their valued positions as being rational and natural.    

The tools for such strategies are myths that describe not only what it claims reality to be, but what it should be.  And central to critical theory is for its advocates to stridently point out and attack oppressive language.  That is to challenge the extended or evolving language of the oppressor – which seeks to maintain the status quo. 

That language often demeans the efforts of critical theorists by using such phrases as “political correctness” in a way that seeks to delegitimize critical critiques of the dominant groups.  One can view such dismissal language as discourses of the privileged.  Yet, to the extent that critical theorists have advanced their messaging, one can consider those cases as genuine successes in their discourse efforts. 

As such, these verbal attacks and responses can be considered a meaningful front in striving to establish a liberated reality among those currently oppressed.  The more critical efforts find further platforms to communicate and distribute their messages, the more they can challenge the prevailing misinformed mental representations of the advantaged groups – that being the messages of “the haves.”

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[1] These postings that convey the basic information regarding critical theory heavily depends on the overview provided by William Outhwaite.  See William Outhwaite, “Critical Theory,” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by David Miller, Janet Coleman, William Connolly, and Alan Ryan (Cambridge, MA:  Blackwell Publishers, Ltd), 106-109.

[2] Valerie Pang, Geneva Gay, & William B. Stanley, “Expanding Conceptions of Community and Civic Competence for a Multicultural Society, Theory and Research in Social Education, 23, 4 (Fall 1995), 302-331.