Socialist Outlook : SO/13 - Autumn 2007

Education

Socialist Educators and Capitalist Education

Dave Hill

Dave Hill, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Northampton asks what does education do in capitalist Britain, in the capitalist world? What can Marxist educators do about it? Recognising the limitations - but also the opportunities of efforts by socialist and critical educators, by socialist teachers, who try to work as critical organic public transformative intellectuals, where should we put our efforts?

It’s not easy. The limitations on socialist action through the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state, such as schooling, that work for the most part on behalf of capital, are considerable. Non-promotion, sidelining, denigration, even dismissals, are common among socialist activist teachers. Lots of us have been there. [1]

Capitalist Teacher Education

How far has education got the potential to fuel the flames of resistance to global capitalism, as well as the passion for socialist transformation? The transformative potential of teachers can be exaggerated. How far can intellectual workers, knowledge workers, or political journalists, and the ideas they develop, change the world, or indeed, change some of our students, colleagues, readers?

The amount of agency, autonomy we have, has always been circumscribed. Critical Marxist voices always have been. And in England and Wales, since the 1988 Education Reform Act and National Curriculum for schools, and the 1992/1993 restructuring of teacher education (renamed ‘training’), spaces within the subject curriculum and within pedagogy - the methods we use - have been narrowed.

Detheorized Teacher Education

Part of this clamping down is the detheorization of initial teacher education (ITE). Study of the social, political and economic contexts of schooling and education has been hidden and expunged. In England and Wales, and elsewhere, ITE is now rigorously policed. ‘How to’ has replaced ‘why to’ in a technicist curriculum based on ‘delivery’ of a quietist and overwhelmingly conservative set of ‘standards’ for student teachers. This has had a major impact on the teaching force, and thereby on schooling. Teachers are now, by and large, trained in skills rather than educated to examine the ‘whys and the why nots’ and the contexts of curriculum, pedagogy, educational purposes and structures and the effects these have on reproducing capitalist economy, society and politics. [2]

Of course, many teachers and students resist, and, by virtue of the material conditions of their own and their families’ and communities’ existence, see through the common sense acceptances of capitalist society and a quietist schooling system. But many don’t. Here, the roles of organization and solidarity, in trade unions and other movements and organizations - and the roles of ideas and counter-hegemonic ideology – of socialist ideas and analyses and plans - are both necessary. The latter for advancing labour, economic and work practice issues to wider ideological interpretation, discussion, development. The former for making sure that ideas don’t remain in ivory towers, on CVs, or people’s front-rooms.

Some people are brilliant organisers, devoted attenders and motivators at meetings. Others write well! Others try to develop theory, to analyse what’s going on, to apply, question and develop Marxist analyses, strategy, tactics and programmes. That’s what our newspapers and leaflets and theoretical journals and books aimed at the public, or at teachers, or at academics, try to do. To develop class consciousness, critical awareness, anger at capitalist (and racist/ sexist/ homophobic) oppression, to develop passion, commitment.

Both organisers and theoreticians are important. Some are gifted at all of these activities. Many can act as both, and in a sense we all do. Action informs understanding, and understanding informs action… but not unproblematically so. Work and critiques of ideology is hard work. Some are better at one or the other.

Critical education for economic and social justice - or socialist education - is where teachers and educators try to act as critical transformative and public intellectuals within and outside of sites of economic, ideological and cultural reproduction. Such activity is both deconstructive and reconstructive, offering a politics of anger, analysis and hope that recognises, yet challenges, the strength of the structures and apparatuses of Capital.

The Role of Intellectuals and the Politics of Socialist Education

What role can educators and other cultural workers play in the struggle for economic and social justice? Support the current system? Ignore it? Go along with post-Marxist and Left-Revisionist acceptance of capitalism? Or should education and other cultural workers organise with others in opposition to capital, seeking its transformation and replacement?

Within classrooms socialist educators seek to enable student teachers and teachers (and school students) to critically evaluate – that is, from a Marxist perspective - a range of salient perspectives and ideologies – including critical reflection itself – while showing a commitment to egalitarianism and socialism.

Socialist pedagogy must remain self-critical, and critique its own presumed role as the metatruth - the gospel - of educational criticism. This does not imply forced acceptance or silencing of contrary perspectives. But it does involve a privileging of socialist, egalitarian and emancipatory perspectives. This does mean adhering to ‘critical pedagogy’, as opposed to ‘critical theory’, since critical thinking’s claim is, at heart, to teach how to think critically, not how to think politically. For Marxists, and for (some) critical pedagogues/teachers, this is a false distinction.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

In the USA a new, Marxist development in what is known as critical pedagogy, is revolutionary critical pedagogy. Its principal exponent is Peter McLaren. While not sweeping the shopping malls or indeed universities and schools, it is having a developing impact on a number of new and young educators. This impact is both theoretical and practical, in the cases of some adherents, it is praxis, practice informed theory and theory informed practice at the same time. Some of their work, and some of their praxis in schools and colleges and in wider arenas, is published in online journals such the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies that I edit, Cultural Logic and Workplace, a Journal of Academic Labor. [3] Of course these are drops in the ocean of racist, sexist, individualistic imperialist capitalist media and schooling. But then, so was the Communist Manifesto! And many combine revolutionary critical pedagogy, or socialist education, with activism within the other arenas of activism, within the USA and the UK, and more globally, too, within trade unions, trade union left groups groups such as Socialist Teachers’ Alliance and, in the USA, the Rouge Forum. [4] So what should and can we do within the limitations of our own lives, skills, opportunities, energy?

United States critical educators McLaren and Farahmandpur ask, ‘how do we organize teachers and students against domestic trends [e.g. the deepening inequalities and exploitation under capital] … and also enable them to link these trends to global capitalism and the new imperialism? What pedagogical discourses and approaches can we use?’ Among their suggestions are that it, ‘has to be critical; that is, it must locate the underlying causes of class exploitation and economic oppression within the social, political, and economic arrangements of capitalist social relations of production.’

It must be profoundly systematic in the sense that it is guided by Marx’s dialectical method of inquiry, which begins with the ‘real concrete’ circumstances of the oppressed masses and moves toward a classification, conceptualization, analysis, and breaking down of the concrete social world into units of abstractions in order to reach the essence of social phenomena under investigation. Next, it reconstructs and makes the social world intelligible by transforming and translating theory into concrete social and political activity. It, ‘should be participatory. It involves building coalitions among community members, grassroots movements, church organizations and labor unions.’ [5]

Arenas for Resistance

Arena 1: Within the Education and Media Apparatuses

The first arena is within the sites of education and the media. Educators and cultural workers should develop ‘critical reflection’ and a commitment to critical and egalitarian action - to socialist action. Teacher education, for example, has to be about more than classroom abilities limited to passing out pre-set nationally approved ‘facts’ plus competence in crowd control. Teachers without the capacity to stimulate critical enquiry leave education always on the edge of indoctrination and quiescence.

School and teacher education courses, film and other media need to present equality issues: on racism, sexism, social class inequality, homophobia, and discrimination/prejudice/regarding disability and special needs. And on how Marxist analysis and action can develop insights and action. Many teachers and students are simply not aware of the existence of such data in education and society or the impact of individual labelling, and of structural discriminations on the lives and education and life-opportunities of the children in their classes, schools and society.

However limited in any particular historical, spatial and political conjunction within capital, resistant and counter-hegemonic acts are possible and necessary, as is socialist utopianism (different from utopian socialism of Marx’s era) – the analysis of the present and the vision and planning for an egalitarian, democratic socialist future. Recognition at any time or place of the contemporary limitations on the counter-hegemonic effectiveness of the actions of teachers or journalists need not lead to negativity and despair - it can lead to a realistic understanding that, where possible, broader alliances and other arenas of actions can be the appropriate strategy for socialist transformation of society.

Arena 2: Working Outside of the Classroom!

Using schools and educational sites as arenas of cultural struggle and education in general as a vehicle for social transformation is premised upon a clear commitment to work with communities, [6] parents and students, and with the trade unions and workers within those institutions. This is the second arena of resistance, working outside of the classroom on issues relating to education and its role in reproducing inequality and oppression.

Working ‘with’ means ‘knowing’ the daily, material existence of the exploited class strata and groups. Ideally it means fulfilling the role of the organic and public intellectual, linked to and part of those groups, acting publically, displaying what Gramsci termed ‘civic courage’. This also means working with communities in developing the understanding that schools and education themselves are places of social, economic and ideological contestation, not ‘neutral’ or ‘fair’ or ‘inevitable’, but sites of class domination. It is thereby important to develop awareness of the role of education in capital reproduction and in the reproduction of class relations.

Arena 3: Mass Action as part of a Broader Movement for Economic and Social Justice

Globally and nationally societies are developing and have always developed, to a greater or lesser degree, critical educators, community activists, organic intellectuals, students and teachers whose feelings of outrage at economic and social class and racial and gender and other forms of oppression lead them and us into activism. Thus, the third arena for resistance is action across a broader agenda, linking issues and experience within different economic and social sectors, linking different struggles.

This arena is linked to the other arenas. It is being part of action, part of networks, part of mini - and of mass action. Ideological intervention in classrooms and in other cultural sites can have dramatic effect, not least on some individuals and groups who are ‘hailed’ or, ‘interpellated’ by resistant ideology. However, actualising that ideology, that opposition to oppressive law or state or capitalist action, the effect of taking part in, feeling the solidarity, feeling the blood stir, feeling the pride in action, the joint learning that comes from that experience, can develop confidence, understanding, commitment.

Anti-capitalist protests and events locally, nationally, globally, are/ have been a learning experience for those who thought such mass actions - whether internationally or nationally, were a product of a bygone age. Through well organised and focused non-sectarian campaigns around class and anti-capitalist issues those committed to economic and social equality and justice and environmental sustainability can work towards local, national and international campaigns, towards an understanding that we are part of a massive force - the force of the international - and growing - working class - with a shared understanding that, at the current time, it is the global neo-liberal form of capitalism - indeed, capitalism itself - that shatters the lives, bodies and dreams of billions. And that it can be replaced - by Socialism.

Dave Hill is series editor for the Routledge Series Education and Marxism, and the Series Education and Neoliberalism, both to be published in 2008.

NOTES

[1] For a minor, but typical, autobiographical example, see my ‘Brief Autobiography of a Bolshie Dismissed’, Hill, 2003 at http://www.ieps.org.uk.cwc.net/bolsharticle.pdf.

[2] D.Hill, 2007, ‘Critical Teacher Education, New Labour in Britain, and the Global Project of Neoliberal Capital’, Policy Futures, 5 (2). Online at http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pfie/content/pdfs/5/issue5_2.asp.

[3] See www.jceps.com, http://clogic.eserver.org/, http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/.

[4] See http://www.socialist-teacher.org/, http://www.rougeforum.org/.

[5] McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p 9. See also McLaren, 2005, McLaren, P. (2005) Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire, Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield.

[6] See, for example, Martin, 2005, ‘You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Bus: Critical Pedagogy as Community Praxis’. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 3 (2). Online at http://www.jceps.com/index.php?pageID=article&articleID=47.

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