CRITIQUE OF CRITICAL THEORY, I

 

Up to this point, this blog has shared a series of postings that inform readers of a construct – critical theory – from the perspective of someone who supports it.  That is, this blogger has been attempting to place himself in that frame of mind as best he can – that’s right, he’s not a critical pedagogue.  But with this posting, this blogger reclaims this platform and shares his ideas and evaluative notions concerning that construct.   What follows is a critique. 

Often the term critique is cast as a negative evaluation – sharing what’s wrong with something.  But more accurately, and as used here, a critique can offer a viewpoint that is quite positive in its ideas or claims.  With that proviso, this posting will review what this blogger likes about critical pedagogy before reviewing his opinions about how the construct falls short from what is needed.

          He is gratified that critical pedagogy – along with critical theory – places an emphasis on the disadvantaged.  In addition, he finds it useful that this construct dethrones the centrality of individualism and that it questions the natural right’s assumption concerning the rationality of people.  Below, in this posting, is a summary explanation of each of these judgements.

          But first, there is some context to review.  Here are some statistics which give credence to what the former senator, John Edwards, argued in his abbreviated run for president some years ago.  That is, he claimed that there are two Americas:  in one, there are the rich and in the other, there are the rest.

          Upon reflection, this is another way to inform people about a Marxian observation.  Marx stated that there are the “haves and have nots.”  America has, in its popular view, claimed that there is a third group, the “have-a-littles,” or what is usually called the middle class.  But this third group is being diminished; some claim it is becoming extinct.  The belief here is that the nation is not there yet, but there are numbers that strongly suggest that the nation is headed to such a dichotomy as Edwards and Marx claim.

          According to CNBC, “The top 1% owned a record 32.3% of the nation's wealth as of the end of 2021 …  The share of wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans, likewise, has declined slightly since before the pandemic, from 30.5% to 30.2%.”[1]    In 2014 the following distribution was reported:  top 1% = 35%, next 4% = 27%, next 5% = 11%, next 10% = 12% OR stated differently:  Upper Middle 20% of the population = 11% of the wealth, Middle 20% = 4%, and Bottom 40% = less than 1%.[2]  So, from the middle class level to less than 1% level (80% of the population),  Americans share less than 16% of the national wealth.

Compare that to 1976 when the top 1% had 23.9% percent of the national wealth[3] and one senses a trend toward the elimination of the middle class as the very rich are absorbing more and more of the national wealth.  This blogger particularly thinks the following statistic from the ought years gives a telling picture of the imbalance: The top .01 percent of income earning households, which numbered about 11,000 households, earned more money than the lowest 25,000,000 households.

And with those numbers one can easily ask:  is the nation starting to look like a developing country in terms of income and wealth distribution?  The effects of the country’s economic woes – be they intense during downturns, or less during times of prosperous growth – prove to be overwhelming to the disadvantaged members of American society. 

Of course, financial imbalances within the citizenry – experience demonstrates – have negative consequences.  Crime occurs more often in low-income areas.[4]  Common sense, given the price of medical care, tells one that the incidence of disease or spread of it is more apt to occur in low-income areas.  And again, there is research to back up this claim.[5]  Low income and low levels of wealth can be associated with many social ills.  Therefore, one can easily reach the conclusion that ill distribution of both affects the health of societies including that of the US.

Ironically, not only do Marxist and/or critical theory writers make these claims, but elite theorists agree, the difference being that these last commentators find little wrong with that reality.  Be that as it may, critical pedagogues make it their point to highlight these conditions.  And they should be highlighted, and federation theorists and their supporters (like this blogger) would agree in that their trump value is societal health or welfare. 

Critical theory also draws one to the collective nature of social reality.  The reconstructionist advocates believe meaningful civics as being a study in how alliances need to be formed in order to accomplish the transformation which they seek.  By doing so, critical pedagogues draw upon the curriculum and, therefore, the student away from the tacit message that all social accomplishments revolve around the individual.  This positive quality is not positive because it bolsters collectivist views, but because it points out an important reality.

That is, the construct questions the bias that holds that social policy should be aimed at heightening the role of individuals and the sanctity of individual rights.  Again, as this blog pointed out when reviewing the natural rights construct, that sanctity of the individual is that construct’s ultimate value and is judged here as a basis for many of the nation’s ills – most particularly, in how it feeds the nation’s current polarized politics. 

How?  By encouraging people to demand societal benefits from the perspective of individual aspirations, shunning the claims of groupings or other arrangements. From more self-centered needs, communal perspectives are lost and with that loss is that aspect of humanity that recognizes the need for such commonality.  The lacking humanity would be insensitive to suffering and injustice. When trampled, these concerns are dismissed or degraded at the cost of making all of Americans less human.

The last bit of positive critical thought this blogger finds appealing is how its advocates have introduced a practical way for people who are concerned over justice, or the lack of it, to study related issues without employing scientific approaches.  The prevailing mode of study calls for behavioral protocols.  Instead, critical theorists – including critical pedagogues – seek richer modes of study that do not limit themselves to reductionist analysis of correlated occurrences of abstracted factors or variables. 

Yes, there is a place for such studies, but they should not be the sole method of doing research.  Since critical researchers’ initial attempts at having American schools consider not just behavior, but focus their study on consciousness and subconsciousness, this more encompassing approach to the study of human affairs is no longer limited to only leftist academics. This shift is becoming more popular among educational and other researchers.   This might not include studies by formal business organizations, but more so among other bureaucratic entities such as school districts.

To give readers a more concrete sense as to what business thinking has been, here is what the conservative pundit, David Brooks, writes regarding the current state of what that sort of thinking has been:

 

[W]hen [Lionel Trilling] noted that so long as politics or commerce “moves toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities that are most susceptible to organization. … As a result, “it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the very interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the mind.”

Rationalism looks at the conscious mind, and assumes that that is all there is. It cannot acknowledge the importance of unconscious processes, because once it dips its foot in that dark and bottomless current, all hope of regularity and predictability is gone. Rationalists gain prestige and authority because they have supposedly mastered the science of human behavior. Once the science goes, all their prestige goes with it.[6]

 

In short, where broader views of social study exist there now exists a real challenge to positivist studies that rely exclusively on measuring behavior as the sole methodology to the scientific study of human affairs. A lot of credit should be extended to critical theorists and, in education, to critical pedagogues for this shift.  But in corporate centers, behavioral methods still rule the roost.

And that is what this blogger believes are positive elements of the critical theory construct.  The next posting will begin to describe and explain what this blogger finds wrong with that construct.

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[1] Robert Frank, “Soaring Markets Helped the Richest 1% Gain $6.5 Trillion in Wealth Last Year, According to the Fed,” CNBC (April 1, 2022), accessed May 10, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/richest-one-percent-gained-trillions-in-wealth-2021.html#:~:text=The%20top%201%25%20owned%20a,from%2030.5%25%20to%2030.2%25.

[2] Wealth Inequality in the United States,” Wikipedia (n.d.), access May 10, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20accumulation%20of%20wealth%20enables,bottom%2050%25%20held%202.6%25.

[3] Josie Green, “How Wealthy Was the 1% Each Year Since 1976,” 24/7 Wall Street (February 10, 2022), accessed May 10, 2023, https://247wallst.com/special-report/2022/02/10/how-wealthy-was-the-1-each-year-since-1976/2/.

[4] For example, Lilik Sugiharti, Rudi Purwono, Miguel Angel Sequivias, and Hilda Rohmawati, “The Nexus between Crime Rates, Poverty, and Income Inequality:  A Case Study of Indonesia,” Economies/MDPI (2022), accessed May 10, 2023, file:///C:/Users/gravi/Downloads/economies-11-00062-v2.pdf.  This article’s authors offer this study as exemplary of the general claim being made here.

[5] For example, Gabriela R. Oates, Bradford E. Jackson, Edward E. Patridge, Karen P. Singh, Mona N. Fouad, and Sejong Bae, “Sociodemographic Patterns of Chronic Disease,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine (January 2017), accessed May 10, 2023, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5171223/.

[6] David Brooks, The Social Animal:  The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York, NY:  Random House, 2011), 227 (emphasis added).

JUDGING CRITICAL THEORY, XVI

 

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

 

With the last posting describing one school of thought under the general construct critical theory – that being reconstructionism – this posting will describe the second school, reconceptualization.  Of the two, reconstructionism has a more collectivist orientation, while reconceptualization leans more toward an individualistic perspective.  Yes, the two share many aims, but the latter emphasizes addressing more directly questions of consciousness.

          How do the two, more specifically, share in the goals and claims they make?  Here is a list of overarching, common attributes:

 

·       they both have an organic and holistic view of people and society,

·       they have a constructional view of knowledge as explained by this blogger in his explanation of constructs,[2]

·       they place an emphasis on personal experiential knowledge,

·       they recognize the power of pre-conscious knowledge,

·       they use the humanities as a source of knowledge (more so with reconceptualization),

·       they place in priority personal liberty with responsibility and higher levels of consciousness (driving one’s consciousness toward self-actualization – again, more so with reconceptualization),

·       they value diversity and pluralism as both a means and ends,

·       they advocate a need to reconstruct social and political processes, and

·       they set forth a new language.

 

But here is how reconceptualization differs from reconstructionism.  During the later years of the twentieth century, life and culture changed drastically from the Great Depression years of the 1930s.  And in those later years, reconceptualization picked up steam.  For one, it applied more recent curricular approaches and adopted its language to a new set of sensitivities and insights (for example, using terms such as “deconstruct”).

          It also employed different categories of consciousness such as gender, race, and sexual orientation as well as socio-economic class, this last category being what reconstruction featured in its arguments.  Reconceptualization advocates point out how these other groups have their own views concerning oppression and oppressive conditions – some are like class-based ideas and views of realities and others differ.  That is, in particular they often vary from class-based views in their consciousnesses regarding oppression.

          Other points of difference include:

 

·       in terms of curriculum, reconceptualization does not hold it as a final product but as an experience, preferring the verb form of curriculum, currere,

·       its advocates rely to a greater degree on psychoanalytic (preconscious) study in analyzing pedagogic conditions and needs,

·       and these advocates are leery of scientific efforts at “discovering” targeted explanations and instead depend on more holistic, as opposed to analytic, understanding.

 

On this last point, reconceptualization advocates see science, as it is mostly practiced, to be overly aimed at problem-solving and tends to support bureaucratic, shallow efforts.  As such, it is a research approach that seriously tends to obfuscate efforts at forming enriched understandings or meanings.  In this, with his problem-posing form of study, the late Paulo Freire can be considered more of a reconceptualization educator who promoted holistic research. 

Irrespective of what their critics claim regarding their approach, reconceptualization advocates argue that their work is value free and not meant or aimed at indoctrinating their audiences, be they students or social activists.  They also boast of broadening their perspective by freely incorporating a larger array of literature such as poems, novels, short stories, and plays – do not be surprised if one finds in their work references to visual arts as well.

          Other points of distinction with reconstructionism are that reconceptualization often relies heavily on existentialism[3] and phenomenology.[4]  It is more focused on individual development as it often centers on self-actualization.  There, the theoretical ideas of Abraham Maslow are recurringly employed.

          This blog has observed that reconceptualization tends to be more in line with the natural rights view than what reconstructionism has been and probably not more so than when its advocates rely on perceptional claims of Carl Rogers and Arthur Combs.  These advocates, while still maintaining the moral and theoretical differences with the natural rights view, do take on a more individualistic view than the more traditional reconstructionist approach.  More concretely, they tend to cater to individuals’ whims and biases.

          Beyond these differences, critical pedagogy overall has had significant influence on higher education in both the US and Europe.  Starting in the 1960s (coinciding with the protests against the Vietnam conflict), its corps of supporters have engaged in various healthy – sometimes unhealthy – debates over various concerns.  Those concerns include community, diversity, social justice, and a host of other concerns over perceived instances of oppression.  Often their discourses relate these concerns to establishing or maintaining societal health.

          For those readers who follow the news of late, they can verify that these issues are or are becoming more central to the national discourse.  Various “red” states are taking a more proactive approach to counter the efforts of critical theorists and have taken on the ill-defined term “anti-woke” to summarize the concerns and antagonism for what critical advocates tend to favor.  And some of this has been affecting civics curricular efforts including the banning of books and other media.

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[1] This posting heavily relies on the work of William Schubert.  See William H. Schubert, Curriculum:  Perspective, Paradigm, and Possibility (New York, NY:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1986).

[2] This blogger has in several postings given a definition for the term, construct. For example, posting dated November 22 or 23, 2010, “A Default Construct,” and can be found in Blog Book First Hundred, accessed May 6, 2023, BLOG BOOK FIRST HUNDRED - Google Docs, 67.  It gives a shortened definition.

[3] General belief in individual existence – investigative effort to determine what is the nature of being, particularly as it applies to individual human beings, as one experiences reality in this ultimately indeterminable world – and in total freedom and responsibility.

Existentialists point out that people are constantly faced with choices in which there are no known laws, ethical standards, or traditions to show the way. This makes life a state of being that inevitably produces anxiety.

[4] Study of consciousness as it relates to being. Founded by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger; it can be a somewhat opaque philosophy. For the purposes here, though, the interest is in its contributions to how one’s mental acts, consciousness, handle   the very nature of things in the practical world. It therefore is an alternative to empirical sciences.