The field of Critical Education Theory has been around for a long time - at least since the time in the 1920s when John Dewey developed his theories of Democracy and Education. In broad principles, it seeks to understand and reveal the ways in which education is influenced by and reciprocally influences the structures and processes of everyday life. In particular, it is concerned (as a  subset of Critical Theory) withy the ways in which power and knowledge are related. It is grounded upon the realisation that education and knowledge are political - that is that what is seen to be legitimate knowledge and education is a contested domain where competing social and cultural groups struggle to have their own beliefs and ideologies become part of the "common sense" of everyday life and meaning. At the moment, this struggle is being waged most forcefully by conservative elements of the political Right in what Michael Apple has called the "Conservative Restoration". They seek to roll back the advances in personal freedoms and rights that have been won (by the poor and disadvantaged, people of colour and other marginalised groups) since the 1940s and to replace these with property rights. Thery are attempting to gain control over the creation of curricula, to impose standardised national resting systems and to "go back" to what they see as  traditional values, beliefs and knowledge. That these traditions and this knowledge was often racist and esclusory passes their notice. But the struggle to achieve hegemony in education (and thereby in the world of everyday life hjas been going on since the introduction of compulsory schooling - which, if we think about it, was only slightly more than a hundred years ago.

In one attempt to make sense of the history of Critical Education Theory, theorist Michael Young suggests that the perceived role of education in society has not been stable. At different times, its purpose has been viewed differently. He roughly divides its perceived social role into three phases:

1.    From the early 1900s to 1945 - as a means of social pacification
2.    From 1945 to 1974 as a means of national economic productivity
3.    From 1974 to the present, as a national economic burden. 

1900-1945

According to Young, initially, public education was seen, as a means of social pacification. As early as the 1790’s in England, educators as well as politicians were well aware of the danger of having a literate poor in society. As Lankshear points out, the British educationalist Hannah More, who established a series of Sunday Schools in the Mendips at that time was careful to make sure that her students only read the Bible, and at no time where encouraged to learn to write. Replying to critics of her reading programme who believed that it would encourage sedition among the lower classes she said:

“I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make them fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.” 

At different times since then, education for the poor has been viewed by the wealthy and powerful as a threat, by the poor themselves as a means of social emancipation, by the middle class as a means of social distinction and by the State as an investment.

During this time, different strategies have been employed to prevent the emancipation of the poor. One of the most significant has been the stratification of the educational system – streaming. In streaming, a small number of potentially talented children are selected for higher education while the rest are channelled towards what is euphemistically called “vocational” training in the trades and the service and manual industries. The basis on which the benchmarking of this streaming process has been conducted has been the Intelligence or IQ Test. Much of the normative research in educational theorising which took place before 1945 therefore concentrated on defining, developing and measuring “intelligence”. As you will see from the literature, there are profound critical rejections of the whole basis for intelligence testing, and the arguments associated with these rejections were among the first to systematically address the issue of imposed inequality in the system, and the State’s complicity in this. The IQ theory continued to have currency up into the 1970s, although the work of Cyril Burt, its originator had long been discredited. A major  reason for its popularity was that it fitted well the Eugenicist philosophies associated with America’s immigration policies which attempted to attract Northern European immigrants while rejecting those from Southern Europe, Africa, etc.

1945-1970

From the end of the Second World War until the mid-1970s, according to Young, education was seen, as a contributor, either potentially or actually, to the national economy in most States.

This view accords closely with the theories put forward by Jerome Karabel and A. H. Halsey of education as a kind of investment in cultural or human capital.  According to this theory the educational investment would return an economic profit to the individual over a lifetime of employment. By the same token, the cumulative economic profit accorded to individuals would by extension flow into the competitiveness of the national economy, increasing investment and exports and leading to general prosperity. During this era, this philosophy developed alongside, and to a large extent influenced, a general expansion of the educational system and a massive investment in the educational budgets of most Western States. The expansion of the education system was quite probably associated with the return of countless thousands of veteran servicemen from the war demanding better opportunities for their children than they themselves had experienced.

While the potential increase in emancipation was a reality, it was also set against the ideological backdrop of the Cold War, and in particular the aggressive anti-communism of the McCarthy era. Repressive movements in the United States to limit legitimate knowledge to only those areas which accorded with rabid anti-Communism led t an internal struggle within academia to define and police the limits of academic freedom. Thus many of the research papers and publications of this time concentrate upon the field of tertiary education, of its curriculum and of the boundaries of academic freedom.

One of the structural characteristics of this system was that it tended to create new pyramidical social structures which differed from the older traditional (aristocratic) structures of privilege and power. These newer structures  - meritocracies, in Michael Young's fictional and futuristic rendering, were based upon natural talent or intelligence.  The idea that everyone in society had a natural potential which was being stifled by the older hierarchical social structures equated with the drive to liberate these potentialities by developing a system based upon individual merit.

It was in this sense that, after the War, the theoretical development of I.Q testing was expanded and overlaid (originally and primarily in Britain) on the existing public school system, to target precisely those children from poor families who had this natural ability to take their place in the developing meritocracy. This was known as the 11-Plus exam, which was designed to "stream" children into different levels of education compatible with their "natural abilities".

From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, significant numbers of children from working class homes entered the University-directed stream, and as a consequence, the State was called upon to significantly expand its educational portfolio, particularly at the tertiary level, in order to absorb these increasing numbers of students with increased expectations. 

1970 - Present

By the mid-1970s, according to Young, the economic burden of these educational costs began to outweigh their perceived economic usefulness to the system. The tax burden which they imposed upon capital, with its consequent reduction in profits required that economies be made. Education (particularly university education) became seen as an economic burden rather than an economic investment. This was particularly the case since research had been able to point to no actual economic benefits at the national level, of the increased educational provision.  Instead, increased levels of educational achievement had simply increased the qualification demands of prospective employers, creating what has been called "credential inflation".

By the mid-1960s, it was becoming clear, in Britain at least, that the proposed social stratification of children according to their "intelligence" measured by the 11-Plus was not working. Researchers discovered that working class students were still largely unrepresented at the university entrance level. 

Gradually, under the Labour Governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, the streaming exam was phased out and a system of comprehensive education was slowly and voluntarily established in its place, with the intention of addressing the social stratification operating within the larger British society, replacing the ethic of individualism and focussing instead on a policy of social cooperation and understanding.

Changes to Critical Education Theory.

Young’s model paints a broad picture which gives some sense to the specific detail of the struggles that have gone on within the educational discourse – of the development of specific Critical Education Theories since the 1950s. As increasing attention was paid to the effectiveness of educational practices throughout the late 1950s, the studies took place against a broader backdrop of social concerns, and against the publication of significant material on Marxism, Existentialism (Sartre), Social Phenomenology (R. D. Laing), and emerging popular culture. In addition, the Leftist emigres from Europe began to exert a profound influence on the realm of philosophical discourse. The Critical Theorists of the so-called Frankfurt School, active in the pre-War 1930s and now living in Britain and the United States brought a whole new analytical dimension to social research.

Critical Theory was first developed by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt (known as the “Frankfurt School” in the 1930’s and takes as its starting point a Marxist analysis of society, but it does so from a position which is also critical of Marxism itself. It begins from the assumption that society as it is currently constituted under Capitalism is basically unjust, unhealthy, wasteful and exploitative. It maintains that those normative values through which society operates and organises itself must be challenged and changed if human beings are to realise their full potential. Drawing from sociological, psychological and anthropological evidence, critical theory holds that a better society is possible, but can only be achieved through fundamental, rather than cosmetic change, but that this change can occur within the life opportunities of each individual engaged in the practice of freedom. Its critical analysis is thus directed towards those structures and mechanisms which create and maintain the normative values of society and through them the power status quo. These theories soon found their way into the studies of education that were taking place.

Critical theorists like the social psychologist Erich Fromm propounded the idea that mental health was not a statistical phenomenon, but a state of integrated being – free from alienation. By this standard, he suggested, whole societies may be sick. Supported in his analysis by Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno and others, these theorists exerted a profound influence upon the post-McCarthy social theorising in the early 1960s, culminating in the seminal work by Berger and Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality in 1966. Together with the Civil Rights Movement, they placed demands upon the education system to account for its inequalities and its responsibility for those in the wider community. 

The influence of the Critical Theorists coincided with and was partially responsible for the burgeoning outpouring of popular culture and student protest of the 1960s. In 1964, students at the University California, Berkeley occupied the main administration building in what was the first of a series of campus revolts. At stake was the University’s refusal to allow the distribution of openly Marxist literature from a stall adjoining a cadet recruiting table. They believed that academic freedom required an open environment for all knowledge, rather than only that legitimated by the institution. The success and publicity of the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley reverberated around the academic world, as the hegemonic role of all State institutions  was subject to the critical scrutiny of newly acquired Leftist philosophies.

In addition, the Vietnam War was becoming an increasingly prominent part of the public awareness, and extreme disparities in recruitment policies (the Draft) which discriminated heavily against people of colour and the working class called into attention the ways in which these disparities were created in the first place.

All of this had a profound effect upon cultural and educational theorising for the next two decades, giving rise to a series of developments which can be crudely characterised as follows.

1.    Theories of Cultural Reproduction
2.    Correspondence Theories (Bowles and Gintis)
3.    Cultural Production -Codification (Bernstein, Bourdieu)
4.    Theories of Resistance (Willis)

Theorising over this time moved from an attempt to understand the ways in which schools reproduce cultural and social asymmetries, through an understanding of the mechanisms by which the State creates a working population which corresponds to the needs of capitalist production. The difficulty with this latter theory, was that it left little room for either hope or improvement. One could not change the school without first changing the wider social and political culture of which it was a part. Yet clearly change did occur, and the so-called Correspondence Theory of Bowles and Gintis failed to account for this fact.

What emerged from this was a closer reading of the actual mechanisms of cultural transmission – the ways in which cultural beliefs, myths and realities are transferred in an educational setting and in the wider community. Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu separately and respectively identified the codification of cultural values and the means of their transmission. This work stimulated much interest in the role of the curriculum, and curriculum theorists like Michael Apple developed important understandings about the relationship between authority, legitimation and knowledge. Among others, Apple pointed to the “silences” in the curriculum – those elements of knowledge which never appear in the officially sanctioned version of the curriculum.

As well, Jackson pointed to the crucial role of what he called the “hidden curriculum” as a medium of social and cultural transmission, imposition and habituation – the time-structuring and spatial arrangement of classes. By the mid-to-late 1970s other theorists and practitioners, most notably Illich and Freire, both working out of Latin America, had begun to question the whole role of the State in education and had begun as a consequence to develop theories of Popular Education. Illich’s Deschooling Society and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed were seminal texts which transformed the whole area of Critical Education. Freire in particular continues to have a profound effect. Freire highlighted the ways in which the peasants of Brazil collude with the State in their own oppression, and how the State for its part maintains their passivity through an imposed system of “expertise” and a system of selective illiteracy.

At the philosophical level, the whole issue of expertise wqas called into question in what French philosopher Lyotard referred to as the “Legitimation Crisis”. In his profoundly influential book The Postmodern Condition; A Report on Knowledge he pointed to the demise of the “Grand Narratives (Progress, Humanism, Scientific Objectivity etc.) upon which all knowledge forms and cultural movements are legitimated, and maintained that whereas what previously constituted legitimate knowledge could no longer sustain its legitimacy. The consequence of this was to place all previously subordinated knowledge (and cultural) forms on an equal footing with those of the dominant culture.

Informed and supported by such broad social critiques as well as by the recent publication of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which developed the theory of hegemony more fully and has since become a standard text for critical theorists, Paul Willis  studied working-class high-school students in Birmingham to pinpoint their resistance to imposed authority and hegemony in his ground-breaking Learning to Lose.

This book focussed a whole generation of new research into the relationship between cultures. Whereas previous analyses had always presumed that the oppressed were the passive recipients of their oppression, the recipients of an imposed culture, what Willis’ study showed was that the oppressed also had a vital and vibrant culture of their own which stood in active resistance to that of the dominant culture. Culture could no longer be framed as a singulaity. Now there were cultures each struggling for social dominance, for hegemony. And notwithstanding that the scales of cultural power are not evenly balanced, nevertheless, the Theories of resistance developed by Willis and others have revealed much about the ways in which culture mediates relationships of power. It is not insignificant also that it was at Birmingham that the black theoretician Stuart Hall developed his now-famous course in Cultural Studies.

The evidence and recognition of the power of culture to shape social relationships confirmed at last the basic tenet of the Critical Theorists in their critique of Marxism and of the Base-Superstructure model which had been at least partly the source of its failure. Orthodox Marxists believed that no actual social changes could take place until the transfer of the means of production (the Base) to the proletariat. Noting the failure of Marxism to achieve global hegemony, the Critical Theorists had always maintained that culture (the superstructure) had an unrecognised capacity to influence social (and economic) change.

This emergence of culture as a major variable in social relations coincided with a much broader development in cultural analysis at the grass roots level. Feminist writers and theorists contributed a great deal to this discourse and many of the important texts of this time are written by women theoreticians. People of colour also contributed to these debates. bell hooks, Cornel West, Stuart Hall, Ynestra King, Uma Narayan and many others. Willis’ findings in Britain were echoed in the States in Dale Spender’s important Learning to Lose, an analysis of the same process in the lives of young women. The focus was now clearly upon the culture of subordination and it was not surprising that at this time Indigenous Rights and experiences should emerge as a significant feature in the theoretical discourse. The issue of cultural, economic and educational self-determination has now assumed a point of singular importance in the theoretical debate, and it is in this context that the recent and ongoing experiences in Maoridom have much to offer to the discourse.
With the economic turndown of the 1970s, the alignment between business and the State in the educational field, the deregulation of Education, the imposition of student fees etc., present it would seem that the future for educational transformation is bleak. The  retrenchment of which Young has written continues to be felt throughout the education system. In this context, once again, theorising has to some extent turned to issues of academic freedom and the relationship of the university with systems of corporate power. However significant hope lies in the role which indigenous groups are playing in their struggle for cultural, economic and educational autonomy.. An awareness of the history of this struggle can only increase our resolve and our ability to implement change, to bring about a more just, a more equitable and a more loving world, through the medium of education.
 

To be continued 

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