Fall
1996
My daughter, Elizabeth, is a junior at Stephen F. Austin High School in
Pensacola, FL. During the first week of school her teacher assigned to
the students the writing of a one to two page essay on "The American
Dream". Elizabeth did not have difficulty in defining her version of the
American Dream. She read some articles from journals and excerpts from
the book, Savage Inequalities by Jonothan Kozol which raised
her awareness of the vast social inequalities, pain and suffering, which
exist in America today. Elizabeth quoted these words from the
Declaration of Independence which reflect the original American Dream. .
.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit
of Happiness. [and that] . . . whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or
abolish it, and to institute a new Government. . .
Her conclusion was blunt, simple, poignant and powerful - ". . .
shouldn’t we ask ourselves, as Americans, ‘Where did our American Dream
go?’"
Elizabeth is right. We should be asking ourselves this question. It will
lead us to the heart of Critical Pedagogy. It requires us to stop, look,
and listen to what we are doing in schools and to analyze why we are
doing what we are doing; it requires us to become conscious of and to
reflect upon the condition of our society, to analyze the relationship
of schooling to society, and to determine whether what we are doing is
the correct thing, and if not, to decide what and how we should change
what we are doing. It requires us to rethink our position on the purpose
of education. It requires us to become aware of the changes that have
taken place in our society over the past two hundred years, not only the
American society, but the community we know as the world. It requires us
to realize that growth and development in technology (the growing use of
computers and the Internet, to name only one of many examples) are
creating changes in the very infrastructures of our society, and
therefore we must determine how we should adjust to those changes, from
the manner in which schooling and education are structured, to how we
think and act in our daily lives. These changes demand that we take
stock of what has meaning, what has worth, and that we critique where we
are going and whether that is where we want to go. will we get there? If
we determine that our present course of action will not guide us toward
our desired goals, then we must deliberate, deciding what actions we
must take in order to adjust the course.
These are the questions of a critical pedagogue. They aren’t new
questions. They were relevant when a group of people established the
United States of America. They are relevant today. Education is a means
for transforming society. The desired transformation.....
"signifies a society in which every person shall be occupied in
something which makes the lives of others better worth living, and which
accordingly makes the ties which bind persons together more perceptible
- which breaks down the barriers of distance between them. . . . Success
or failure in its realization depends more upon the adoption of
educational methods calculated to effect the change in the quality of
mental disposition - an educative change. . . . It would train power of
re-adaptation to changing conditions so that future workers would not
become blindly subject to a fate imposed upon them. This ideal has to
contend not only with the inertia of existing educational traditions,
but also with the opposition of those who are entrenched in command of
the industrial machinery, and who realize that such an educational
system if made general would threaten their ability to use others for
their own ends. . . . But this very fact is the presage of a
more equitable and enlightened social order, for it gives evidence of
the dependence of social reorganization upon educational reconstruction."
(italics and bold are added.)
These words were written by John Dewey in 1916. They speak to the
conditions of 1776 and to the conditions of 1996. They speak to the
hearts and needs of our children, of all in our society who are not
free, who are oppressed, trapped, and blocked from fulfilling their
American Dream. We can be certain that many members of our society are
not free, are oppressed, that there is severe inequality when fourteen
million of the children in the United States attend schools which are
structurally and/or environmentally unsafe; when nearly 50% of our
children live in poverty or below; when ceilings weakened by leaking
water collapse forty minutes after children leave for the day, and raw
sewage backs up on front lawns and into kitchens of schools, and over
20,000 schools function with less-than-adequate plumbing, roofs,
heating, ventilation and air conditioning, and electric; more than 52%
of all students attend schools that suffer from at least one
unsatisfactory environmental condition such as poor air quality,
acoustics, ventilation, heating and lighting. Yet the words of John
Dewey speak to Hope.
Critical Pedagogy is hope. Critical Pedagogy can open the door to
solutions. Our greatest enemy is hopelessness. We have become cynical.
We read the words of the Declaration of Independence, or the
Constitution, or the words of John Dewey quoted above, and our
hopelessness numbs us to the possibilities which exist. Herbert Marcuse
described this state of society in his book One-Dimensional Man,
which was a book of critique and of possibilities. Marcuse saw mankind
as trapped by the society which he had created, and saw this society,
which he described as technological, as having become out of control.
Man no longer controlled his own life or his creations, such as
technology, rather, man was now controlled by the machine he had
created. All attempts at change and freedom were instantly swallowed up
and contained by this machine. This sounds negative, yet what Marcuse
was doing here was making a critical evaluation of what is, which is the
first step in getting to where we should be. That was the basis of what
is known as
Critical Theory, developed by Marcuse and his colleagues at the
Frankfurt School in Germany.
Rather than focusing primarily on the
economics of society as Marx did, critical theorists believed that they
should look at the total society - all the interrelated, interdependent
functions of society; they chose an interdisciplinary approach which
included philosophy, economics and politics, and culture and society. To
accomplish this a multidisciplinary group was formed. They worked
together analyzing the family and authority, capitalism and the changes
in capitalism, and fascism. They criticized the validity claims of the
separate disciplines, and attempted to create a new kind of social
theory. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse is calling mankind to
an awakening; he is attempting to raise the consciousness of mankind so
that mankind may take action to create a better life. Marcuse is showing
us the possibilities. Possibilities, hope, change and a better life are
the goals of those educators, politicians, artists and philosophers who
share the tradition of Critical Pedagogy.
Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, speaks of a pedagogy of hope. He
speaks of the "untested feasibility" - possibility. He states that we
are surrounded by a pragmatic discourse that would have us adapt to the
facts of reality. "Dreams, and utopia, are called not only useless, but
positively impeding. . . . But for me, on the contrary, the educational
practice of a progressive option will never be anything but an adventure
in unveiling. It will always be an experiment in bringing out the
truth." Freire defines true hope: . . .
"I do not understand human existence, and the struggle needed to improve
it, apart from hope and dream. Hope is an ontological need. Hopelessness
is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of that
ontological need. When it becomes a program, hopelessness paralyzes us,
immobilizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible
to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that
will re-create the world. . . . I do not mean that, because I am
hopeful, I attribute to this hope of mine the power to transform reality
all by itself, so that I set out for the fray without taking account of
concrete, material data, declaring, ‘My hope is enough!’ No, my hope is
necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it,
my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope
the way a fish needs unpolluted water."
The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken
in that kind of naiveté, is an excellent route to hopelessness,
pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the
struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to
calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous
illusion. . . . The essential thing, as I maintain later on, is this:
hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. . . .
Hence the need for a kind of education in hope. . . . One of the tasks
of the progressive educator, through a serious, correct political
analysis, is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the
obstacles may be.
by Anne Shaw, 1996
