Skirting around the Issue

What follows is the result of a discussion at the Institute of Education last week. The discussion was based around the government and Oxfam supported initiative to introduce ‘Education for Global Citizenship’ into primary and secondary schools in England and Wales. My initial reaction was negative and – I am ashamed to say – unnecessarily dismissive. Not critical, just dismissive.

These posts may not be closely related to the ‘Education for Global Citizenship’ initiative; I don’t yet know enough about it to be able to judge. But they are written in the hope that by skirting around the subject, and by maintaining a healthy distance, I can begin to explain my distrust of the discourses surrounding ‘Global Citizenship’.

Critical Pedagogy

The field of Critical Pedagogy defies any clear-cut generic definition and is a diverse body of work made up of different theoretical positions with convergences as well as divergences and contradictions.

What these positions have in common are educational theories and practices that aim to open a critical space in which learners and teachers can reflect critically on ideology, power and culture (Leistyna & Woodrum, 1996) which stem from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

A useful place to start when considering critical pedagogy is the work of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, particularly his works ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ and ‘Education for critical Consciousness’, originally published in Brazil in 1970 and 1974 respectively. Freire’s originality lies in his development of a practical emancipatory pedagogical method designed to liberate subjects from a ’banking’ model of education where education is:

[...] an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositaries and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘’banking’’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. (Freire, 1996, p.53)

This authoritarian model of education maintains an oppressive social order through a number of operations enforced by the teacher: students are passive consumers of knowledge passed on by the teacher; the learner is stripped of human agency in that s/he is not treated as a conscious being (‘corpo consciente’); the curriculum is split in an artificial manner and it is the teacher that prepares the content; learners do not ‘’develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves’’ (Freire, 1996, p.64); and finally, the banking authority ‘’sets up house inside of the student’s consciousness, instilling its own policies within the student’s worldview’’ (Bingham, 2002, p.450).

Freire’s model of a participatory education for emancipation is based on an “active, dialogical, critical and criticism-stimulating method” (Freire, 2007 p.40) to promote ‘conscientização’,or the critical awareness of the sources of oppression (Blackburn, 2000). This method is aligned with curriculum reform and the codification of cultural knowledge through the exploration of the participants’ reality through its artistic representation (see Freire, 2000). The vision of learning underlying Freire’s method is constructivist in nature where the educator takes on the role of a facilitator who grounds all class work within the context of the particpants’ reality:

Thus the educator’s role is fundamentally to enter into dialogue with the illiterate about concrete situations and simply to offer him the instruments with which he can teach himself to read and write. This teaching cannot be done from the top down, but only from the inside out, by the illiterate himself, with the collaboration of the educator. (Freire, 2007, p.43, italics are mine)

Criticisms of Freire’s model of education for cultural emancipation largely focus on the particularist notion of oppression and liberation in Freire’s work and the potential for the replication of oppression inherent in this particularist notion of power, and in Freire’s concept of the use of authority ‘on the side of freedom’ (see Gur-Ze’ev, 1998 and Blackburn, 2000).

Other criticisms of Freire question the feasibility of Freire’s emancipatory project from a psychoanalytical perspective of subjectivity and also from a notion of the formative potential of power drawing on the work of Foucault (see Foucault 1979) and Judith Butler (1997).

Subjectivity and the Formative Potential of Power

The learner in Freire’s work (and indeed in other constructivist models of education) is seen as a subject who acquires knowledge and learns unproblematically (Cho, 2007). Daniel Cho questions whether this concept of subjectivity is valid for critical pedagogy considering that critical education aims to raise awareness of social traumas such as political oppression, class conflict and economic exploitation (Cho, 2007). Cho’s argument is that any cursory look at the culture industry (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997) and schooling will reveal that “the learning of traumatic knowledge does not proceed without a show of resistance” (p. 703). It is doubtful whether the traumatic knowledge of oppression can be willfully learnt without resistance or negation on the part of the subject. This leads to the conundrum that whilst the kind of learning necessary in critical pedagogy is the acquisition of traumatic knowledge, this is exactly the type of knowledge that learners will tend to resist. Freire’s model of education doesn’t account sufficiently for mechanisms that might prevent the subject from learning and from emancipation.

In accordance with this cartesian vision of subjectivity in Freire, the subject passively absorbs acts of oppression imposed by the opressor (Cho and Lewis, 2005). A psychoanalytical view of subjectivity and power however, recognises that any analysis of oppressive relations needs to take the unconscious into account as relations of power persist in the unconscious and are libidinally invested. Freire’s educational project can be criticised from this perspective as it fails to consider the residual psychic life of the banking model of education.

Cho and Lewis (2005) combine the insight above with an analysis of Foucault’s theory of the formation of the subject in and through power to develop their discussion of the psychic life of the banking model and their criticism of Freire’s notion of power:

[…]for Foucault, every subjectivity is the effect of power, and as such, the relations of power whose effect is the subject must be analysed. Read together, psychoanalysis and Foucault pinpoint a problematic that Freire and Marxist educational theorists have yet to untangle: the oppressed student is a subjective effect ofoppressive power relations that persist in the unconscious. That is to say, if the student is an object of oppression, then, it cannot be missed how that student is also a subject of those forces of power, and as such, libidinally invested in oppressive power relations (Cho and Lewis, 2005, p.315)

What is needed therefore is a critical pedagogy capable of emancipating the subject from unconscious attachments to hegemonic relations of power. The basis of such a project is necessarily a theory of political subjectivity that can explain the subject’s libidinal investment in forms of power and oppression…

References:

Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso.

Bingham, C. (2002). On Paulo Freire’s debt to psychoanalysis: authority on the side of freedom. Studies in Philosphy and Education , 21, 447-464.

Blackburn, J. (2000). Understanding Paulo Freire: reflections on the origins, concepts, and possible pitfalls of his educational approach. Community Development Journal , 35:1, 3-15.

Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cho, D. (2007). Wo we war: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Subjectivity. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 39:7,703-719.

Cho, D., & Lewis, T. (2005). The Persistent Life of Oppression: The Unconscious, Power, and Subjectivity. Interchange , 36:3, 313-329.

Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Freire, P. (2007). Education for Critical Consciousness. London: Continuum.

Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Gur-Ze’ev, I. (1998). Toward a nonrepressive critical pedagogy. Educational Theory , 48:4, 463-486.

Leistyna, P., & Woodrum, A. (1996). Context and Culture: What is Critical Pedagogy? In: P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & S. Sherblom, Breaking Free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy (pp. 1-7). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Publishing Group.