R.C. Smith and Sarah Amsler
Education has become a core institution of capitalist colonialism and a highly politicised cultural practice. People fight for, against and with education in struggles for dignity, autonomy and humanization – from grassroots movements harnessing organized learning for democracy and ecological revolution to the abolition of schooling as an authoritarian and colonizing practice; from the occupation of schools and universities as resources for justice and refuges for dissent, to the creation of autonomous learning communities providing shelter from institutions. Now, as individuals and movements across the world strive to create new epistemic and economic foundations for fundamental social transformation and post-capitalist futures in conditions of unprecedented capitalist colonization, educational issues are central critical-theoretical concerns.
In many places, space for thinking and practicing a critical politics of education is: cramped and repressed within hegemonic knowledge institutions; devalued within professionalized critical and radical theory; fragmented by disciplinary, social and geopolitical divisions; and invisibilized in popular media and discourses. Yet precisely because of these closures, many new spaces of hope for radical learning (and unlearning) are also being prised open. The aim of this special issue is to provide another space for sharing this new critical thinking on education today, in its broadest sense – to refuse the forces that chain education to domination, and make visible all the incredible work that is being done both inside and outside institutions around the world to critique, theorize and revitalize liberating modes of learning. We invite all self-defined critical theorists of education, practitioners of critical and radical pedagogies, and members of alternative learning projects, education movements and communities to come together and help develop a radical alternative philosophy of education.
Some points of departure
There is a multitude of crises in education today, and many of the struggles that are currently taking place in families and communities, schools, colleges, universities and alternative educational institutions are rooted in broader historical movements. However, the acute crises of environment, capital and democracy which now grip the globe evoke some broad questions for practical–critical theorizations of learning and education. We outline some of these here as a preliminary framework for dialogue and debate that we hope will be developed, interrogated, critiqued and transformed by our interlocutors.
A critique of mainstream education in capitalist societies
John Holt once wrote that our schools fail children. How do they fail children? From one’s first introduction to the mainstream education system through to their graduation (if the individual even gets that far), young people are ‘drilled with repetitive tasks which make little or no claim on their attention or demands on their intelligence’. What Holt is drawing our attention to is how traditional methods of teaching are structured on more or less distorted ways of conveying information, requiring students to comply with very strict authoritarian rules on what it means to learn. Some argue that these constraints can be overcome in higher education, which Edward Said (speaking of US universities) once described as the ‘last remaining utopia’ in contemporary society. However, there has also been prolific criticism that the deadening effects of dislocated knowledge, intellectual policing, intersectional hierarchies and conformism are among adults as well – and, more profoundly, that modern universities and higher education are integral parts of the colonial matrix of global power, as they become increasingly appropriated by the system of capital.
The questionable practice of contemporary education extends far beyond the questionable manner in which children’s learning is shaped. The far more sinister reality has to do with the rationale behind mainstream education, as one which aims to drill the subject with endless busywork in preparation for an economic life. Javier Sethness Castro wrote a wonderful line on this very point in a recent essay, when he reflected: “childhood in late capitalism is little more than a preparatory stage for getting along: conformity, adjustment, and alienated labor. The system progressively negates the radical potential of the unintegrated child”, and normalises injustice, inequality and militarization. This process of integration continues in further and higher education through the commodification and marketization of knowledge and, for those paying to study, through pedagogies of precarity and debt.
The complexity of the crisis in mainstream education systems across the world today is thus deeply connected with how education is used as an instrument to reproduce the sociohistorical-cultural ideology of modern capitalist society. In other words: if a healthy education system is the lifeblood of a healthy society, then perhaps it is no coincidence that in an ailing society serious questions can be raised about the ailing institution and practice of education. One of the weak-points in less-than-radical strands of philosophy of education is precisely their failure to recognise the broader context surrounding our schools – most particularly the structural transformation of educational activities into economic instruments through market mechanisms and managerial control. For this reason it does not always recognize that the deeper motivations and rationale behind mainstream education is entangled in sociohistorical-cultural structures, which, in turn, are driven to influence subject-formation in a way which integrates the person into the social, economic and political status quo and deepens the “vicious circle” (to borrow from Marcuse) of social pathology. The entire drive of capitalism on a structural and systemic level is to produce and reproduce a social dynamic that promotes individuals’ development not as open, free-flourishing subjects but as repressed, closed instruments of economic and cultural power. This is why education across the globe has not become more autonomous and democratic but the exact reverse.
Critical pedagogies and struggles in and for public education
The subsumption of organised learning into hegemonic logics of state and market has been contested by progressive educators, radical educators, critical educational theorists, alternative education movements, and communities of struggle within the system since its inception in the nineteenth century. Commitments to autonomy, democracy and community are prominent in these critical perspectives, as illustrated in John Dewey’s treatise on the relationship between Democracy and Education, Maxine Greene’s pleas for diverse and inclusive curricula which enable young people to confront the ‘contradictions, the instances of savagery, the neglect and the possibility of care’ in unjust and conservative societies, or bell hooks’ insistence that the classroom is a space of possibility to ‘labor for freedom, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress’.
To develop these commitments, activist scholar-educators in the United States and Britain threw themselves into creating a new approach to ‘critical pedagogy’ during the 1980s and 1990s. This work integrated insights from Marxism, Frankfurt School critical theory, Latin American liberation education (primarily the ideas of Paulo Freire) and later Anglo-European critical race, feminist and postmodern perspectives to inform a ‘pedagogy of the opposition’ that would re-politicize the analysis of education and teaching practice itself both inside the classroom and in public life. This diverse – and internally much contested – body of scholarship offers a wealth of intellectual resources for people fighting to make learning a democratizing, humanizing and liberating activity, and for those who are combating multiple forms of violence and oppression in schools, colleges and universities every day.
However, space for practicing and theorizing critical pedagogy is diminishing in many of these institutions and in the popular imagination of what education is and is for. The ‘value’ (and therefore the existence) of critique is dwindling in pro-capitalist, market-oriented universities; ideals of teaching and learning for transformation or democracy or liberation are subordinated to ideologies of learning for profit and competitive advantage; and critical pedagogical philosophies, theories and politics are being rendered functionally irrelevant for many aspiring teachers who face futures in pressurized performance-driven schools offering little autonomy, pedagogical time, creative freedom, democratic forms of governance, or intellectual or social respect.
As these conditions deteriorate through the capitalist advance into education across the world, it is not surprising that we are also seeing a proliferation of struggles to resist them – student, teacher and parent/community protests, campaigns and occupations to resist standardised testing, public school closures and charter or ‘free’ school openings, increased (or any) private tuition fees, racial and sexual profiling and discrimination, censorship of textbooks and curricula, the outsourcing and intensification of educational labour, the militarization of schools, institutional investments in conflict materials and fossil fuels, and so on.
Alongside these struggles in and for public schooling and higher education, progressive, critical and radical educators are also abandoning teaching altogether or engaging in what Vanessa de Oliveria Andreotti, Sharon Stein and Cash Ahenakew call ‘system walk out’ – attempts to ‘develop alternatives to modernity that will not reproduce its violences’ by creating parallel spaces, organizations, institutions and networks outside of the mainstream systems. The anti-dialectical tensions in this desire to find or create an ‘uncontaminated “outside”’ to the ‘Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal Wester-centric/Christian-centric World System’ are a matter of much theoretical and practical debate. However, attempts to escape the dominant logics of the system through constructing alternative educational spaces and ‘infrastructures of resistance’ have been a critical dimension of struggles for radical democratization – and, in the present context, are resurging.
Radical educational alternatives and alternatives to education
Projects to ‘reimagine’ and recreate education have flowered in advanced capitalist societies in recent decades. Some are born in struggles for dignity, land, autonomy and the possibility of living well. Others fight for the visibility, revaluation, flourishing and survival of indigenous and aboriginal knowledges and ways of life. Some construct theoretical, affective, and material resources for resisting epistemic and economic dispossession and for healing the injuries of oppression, abstraction and alienation. Others work to cultivate and deepen affective politics and counter-capitalist sensibilities of mutual aid, democratic dialogue and dissensus, co-operation and collective care. Some work to develop alternative learning spaces which foster healthier subject-formation and development of the self, to promote open and free-flourishing subjectivity, as well as more reconciled views of knowledge and relating.
Radical new theories of knowledge and learning thrive in politico-pedagogical and social experiments aiming to generate ‘oppositional consciousness and opportunities for conscientization’ in political struggle, professional practice and everyday life. Some parts of this diverse alter-education movement build on what ‘rich traditions of subaltern philosophies, knowledges and pedagogies’, including ‘indigenous cosmologies, liberation theology, traditions of popular education, participatory action research and practices emerging from anti-racist, queer and black feminist traditions’, as well as traditions of anarchistic, supplementary and co-operative schooling, and of independent working-class education. Some parts draw inspiration from radical philosophies of knowledge and learning, such as experiential education, and also from alternative theories of more reconciled space. There are also radical critiques of organised education as a form of violence in itself and communities dedicated to unlearning – which, according to Manish Jain of the Swaraj University, is ‘critical for helping us to visualize many worlds outside of the lens of institutionalized power’ (along with practices of decolonizing, de-institutionalizing, ‘deschooling’, de-professionalizing and ‘delinking’ from hegemonic epistemologies).
As John Holloway argues, it is in such projects that we ‘recognise the revolts that exist everywhere, and […] find ways of touching them, resonating with them, drawing them out, ways of participating in the thawing and confluence of that which is frozen’. Critical work within mainstream educational logics and institutions, and radical alternatives them, often exist at the edge of possibility. It is precisely because they embrace the marginal, the fumbling, the flawed and the fragile edges of possibility that they are, in Ernst Bloch’s terms, ‘phenomena in which Unbecome is located and seeks to articulate itself’. Yet professional critical theorists have often underestimated the significance and potential of the radical epistemologies, practices and pedagogies which are forged here.
Critical theory and alternative education
Our theorizing education (critique of mainstream, critical pedagogy, ‘alternative’ and radical) in this issue of the Heathwood Journal aims to engage with articles such as Douglas Kellner’s Critical Theory of Education, furthering the position when it comes to developing a critical philosophy of education that builds on and synthesizes numerous perspectives and movements, integrating these perspectives while also employing a progressive methodology which combines Frankfurt School critical theory and systematic empirical analyses with ethnomethodology, existentialism, feminism, humanism, interactionism, Marxism, phenomenology, structuralism, system thinking and systems theory.
Insofar that we also seek to overcome the fragmentation endemic to established academic disciplines, we invite contributions which draw upon multi-disciplinary techniques and methods combining perspectives from anthropology, cognitive science, cultural theory, epistemology, geography, law, history, natural science, philosophy, political economy, psychology, sociology and (etc.). We also welcome the prospect of dialogical thinking among a diverse roster of people, and seek to combine a diversity of perspectives within education to help formulate the early foundations of a radical alternative philosophy of education.
Moreover, we wish to stress that this Call for Papers is not meant to frame issues of education in one lens or another – for example, through a lens of deschooling (as a shorthand for radical de-institutionalization and etc.), as inherently violent, or in some other way. The position of this brief is that neither or all are entirely accurate in themselves: from de-schooling and radical de-institutionalizing, as a tradition, to a critique of violence in education and, further, to more traditional critical theoretical framing in critical pedagogy, experiential framing or even also humanistic readings and critique. Each contributes something important, and one of the purposes of this issue of the Heathwood Journal is to develop a much-needed critical synthesis – a synthesis based on an alternative, foundational view (not only of education, but of the subject, of epistemology, etc.). In other words: we seek to organize a significant contribution to a radical alternative philosophy of education.
In this sense, critical theory is understood to play an important role in that it offers a significant and important part of the foundation for such a radical, progressive alternative philosophy of education. This isn’t to say that this issue should be interpreted as strictly framed within Critical Theory. It is only that Critical Theory – understood largely in the sense of the early Frankfurt School – offers important and necessary tools and concepts for understanding issues of education within context of the forces, developments and trends of global capitalist society. Critical theory is, in other words, most valuable in relation to education when it comes to offering a broader critical social philosophical viewpoint – something we fear many alternative education movements seem to lack.
Thus whether it is Marcuse or Adorno or Fromm – they offer valuable insights; but we wish to position this issue of the Heathwood Journal on the understanding that critical theory is most valuable when it comes to understanding broader trends and how these may relate to schooling and learning, movements and education initiatives to interpret issues and phenomena and data in more accurate ways, and provide a broad philosophical and theoretical foundation.
In short: the aim of this Call for Papers is to achieve two things: 1) do justice to the value of critical theory in relation to far-reaching issues of education, and highlight how it can support, foundationally, a critical intervention; and 2), honour the valuable contributions the many progressive and alternative traditions, from experiential to de-schooling, critical pedagogy, and so on, offer when it comes to understanding the many problems with contemporary education and how we may develop a foundational, integrative and critically synthesized alternative viewpoint. This alternative philosophy of education, we hope, will help inform academics, activists, and education initiatives around the world in terms of offering guidance in theory and in practice.
Some guiding questions
* Informed by a wider critical social philosophy, how can we synthesize, integrate or bring into dialogue and encounter the many progressive movements in education on behalf of more comprehensive, holistic alternative visions of education, learning and development?
* What does a critical, radically democratic, philosophy of education look like in practice? What makes it possible? What would it look like where it does not now exist? How might we transform our education institutions, universities, classrooms and learning spaces for the benefit of more reconciled educational dynamics?
* What about transformations in terms of a critique of the dominant and violent epistemologies now rampant in global capitalist society, pathologies of reason, and dominant modes of cognition and social organization? How can a radical alternative philosophy of education support the development of alternative epistemology and anthropology?
These questions and more represent the landscape that the forth issue of The Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory would like to explore. These are only guiding questions which offer a sense of direction, and we encourage authors to also raise their own questions and confront whatever relevant issues they see fit within the overall brief we have laid out. As a publication which seeks to help inform progressive and emancipatory struggle for societal transformation, Issue 4 of the Heathwood Journal will be as much about fundamental social critique as it will be about constructing an alternative social world. Together, can we meet the challenge?
Author information
We invite scholars across disciplines, who have a particular interest in education and a familiarity with Heathwood’s project, to submit articles of between 1500 and 10000 words. The purpose of this Call for Papers is to take up the challenge of formulating a radical, progressive philosophy of education toward the ends of generating new insights, models and visions for more reconciled and emancipatory educational practice. As alluded, we especially encourage submissions that work across disciplinary boundaries building on scholarly enquiry and critical social engagement, to found these new avenues for the critical retrieval and advancement of education.
We ask that you familiarise yourself with Heathwood’s project before making your submission.
If you have any questions or concerns, or if you’re unsure if your article will fit with the theme of this issue, please don’t hesitate to contact us:
submissions[at]heathwoodpress[dot]com
The particulars:
* 10 October, 2016 is the deadline for submissions.
* Submissions that are accepted will be published in Issue 4 of the Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory.
* Theme of issue: New Horizons: Developing a Radical, Alternative Philosophy of Education [Heathwood Journal, Issue 4]
* We are open to articles ranging from 1500 words (minimum) to around 10,000 (maximum) words. Our aim is to have a good mix of longer and shorter pieces.
* Format and styling: all articles are to be submitted in APA. Please see our reference guide for more information.
* Articles go through a process of intense review, which includes peer review when the editor sees fit.
Please send submissions to: submissions[at]heathwoodpress[dot]com
R.C. Smith
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Sarah Amsler
